


The Deeper You Go

by bodiddleydarn



Series: The Deeper You Go AU [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: AU, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bartender Boytoy AU, Consensual Infidelity, Fluff and Angst, M/M, NAMESWAP COMPLIANT, Political Marriage, Reverse Pines, Revised Version, Tearjerker, explicit - Freeform, fiddlestan, longfic, mcgrunkle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-17 19:12:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 69,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3540809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodiddleydarn/pseuds/bodiddleydarn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Younger!AU, Reversed-ish!AU-- either way, this is an excuse to examine a world where Fiddleford McGucket never went crazy and Preston Northwest never inherited wealth, in an AU where Fiddleford McGucket became big-man-on-campus in Gravity Falls, and Stanley Pines didn't magically toughen-up out of his childhood anxieties by learning how to box. </p><p>Basically, this is just one big, filthily self-indulgent AU of an AU where Fiddleford is the confident, bold instigator, and Stanley is the self-conscious, shy and nervous hesitator. </p><p>Also, I have a problem of not being able to write anything that's not "fucking long".<br/>Buckle up, gang.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>**<b>ADDENDUM EDIT 27.7.2015</b> -- THIS WORK WAS WRITTEN AND COMPLETED BEFORE THE TWIN NAMESWAP THEORY WAS CONFIRMED IN THE SHOW, AND HAS BEEN REVISED TO REFLECT THE CURRENT CANON.**</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Your Honor, if I might, I'd like to lay all blame on jimsdeadbones for making inspirational fanart, nuttersincorporated for feeding the angst-monster, and for lobstronomousskeleton for being a constant, giant fucking enabler. (Love you, bb.)
> 
> This fanfic is, at times, incredibly explicit. Watch where you read, kids. 
> 
> Concrit always welcome!  
> But don't be a dick.
> 
> _(I don't think you'd be here if you're not already somewhat familiar with fanfiction. But, for clarity-- Three centered dots indicate a brief time skip between closely-related events, and a weird mess of colons and dots indicates a significantly longer time skip between less-related events.)_

“Yeesh. Look all these friggin’ trees. It’s unnatural.”

“They’re trees. In nature. That is literally the  _definition_  of ‘natural’, dude.”

“It ain’t right,” his brother complained. “Where’s all the concrete? Where’s all the buildings? Look at this stupid road; it’s all dirt.” He kicked a clod of earth with his sneaker. “Not even crumbling asphalt out here. It’s  _pathetic_.”

“Stanley, you just moved from  _The Garden State_ ,” Stanford emphasized, hauling open the trunk.

“I’m sorry,” His twin turned around, putting his fists on his slim hips. “I forgot about the sprawling fields of grasses and hedgerows and goddamned tulips we left behind in  _Trenton_. Forgive me.”

“Jesus,” Stanford half-laughed, half-croaked on an exasperated sigh. He shouldered the strap of a lumpy duffle and pulled out a big, wheeled suitcase from the trunk of his Cadillac, dropping it on the ground with a  _thud_. “Come get your shit, and shut up.”

Stanley pushed up his glasses. “Alright, bro.”

The cabin was large and simple in construction. Whoever had owned it previously had left only the barest of essentials in furniture and décor; the carpeting was decent, the wallpaper acceptable enough, and the windows-- though all mismatched --showed signs of care.

“…Is that a dinosaur skull?”

Stanley kicked at the fossil’s huge lower jaw, listening to the solid, dull clunking he made. “I think it might be fiberglass,” he said, shrugging up his own bag higher onto his shoulder. “Either way, it looks pretty cool!”

“Yeah, you’re telling me,” Ford muttered. He turned towards the stairs. “I’m going to set my stuff down into the first bedroom I find.”

“I’m gon’a find the can,” Lee answered, thumping along behind him. “You said all the utilities and shit’s already connected here, right?”

“That’s what the realtor told me.”

“You’d better hope so,” his twin warned, voice sounding echoed. He obviously found a bathroom. “Either way, I’m about to piss in at least  _one_  of these porcelain bowls.”

“Delightful.”

Stanford took a few minutes after unloading his bags into a nearby bedroom to wander through the cabin, nodding to himself.

This was a nice place to start his research, he thought. Out of the way of neighbors, quiet, comfortably woodsy. The cabin was a little on the empty side, especially compared to the prospect of just Stanley and himself staying there; but his boxes should be arriving from the university within the next few days, and he’d already promised Cheryl she could pick out furniture if she wanted, when she visited. The brunet rapped his knuckles on the wall, feeling pleased. It’d fill up in no time.

And he would officially own the property, too, as soon as he…

“Hey Stan, come unload your bike!” Stanford shouted towards the staircase. “I need to take that trailer into town.”

His brother met him back outside, stepping up onto the short trailer to work the ratchet braces loose from his motorcycle. “So, where are you taking this?” Stanley asked. The boxer carefully loosened the straps and draped them down the sides of his bike, wiping away dust and scuff lines from its dark blue finish.

“I called ahead to a nearby pawnshop when we stopped for gas at that place with the goats,” Stanford told.

“I forgot about that place,” Lee mentioned, shuddering. He started to wind the nylons around themselves, holding the latches tightly in his fist. “Like, deliberately.”  
  
Stanford took the rolled-up bracers from Stanley when his twin handed them down, tossing them in the trunk of his car. He watched as Lee kicked down the little tailgate ramp and then carefully backed down his motorcycle. “The guy’s promising me enough to finish out the payment for this place,” the researcher continued. “I’ll need to take the money over to the realtor right after, though.”

“That’s cool, that’s cool,” Lee said, clearly only half-listening. He was wheeling his bike towards the space by the cabin’s tiny porch. “I’ll stay here, then. Unpack my shit for a little bit.”

“You have  _two bags_ , man,” Lee pointed out. He looked at his brother. “…Do you just want to take the Triumph out for a spin?”

Lee arched a brow at him, smirking. “ _Duuuh_.”

Stanford flapped a hand at his twin. He yanked open the driver’s side of his Cadillac, unpocketing his keyring with a jingle. The windows were still rolled down, so he knew his brother could hear him as he climbed inside. “Do what you want. You’ve been sitting in a vehicle for 20 hours, but whatever. Sit straddled for a while, instead; change it up a bit.” Ford looked over at Stanley through the passenger’s side window. He patted a broad, six fingered hand against his gut with a wry smile. “But be warned: keep sitting still so much, and you’ll start to look like _me_.”

Stanley made a face at the comment, and Stanford cranked the engine with a barking laugh.

 

. .::. .

 

Thirty years ago, while most of the country was losing its mind over Elvis’s hips and making obscenely massive cars with too many fins and not enough seatbelts, a sleepy little mountain town called Gravity Falls caused a stir in the upper echelons of academia.

America was riding high after the war and had vowed to beat the Big Red Scare however she could ( _“Or die trying, damn it!”),_ and scientists of every stripe had been ordered by the man on high to innovate life itself in order to keep up with the enemy. It was a bold new era of exploration, with all of the smart money staying firmly on the eggheads making discoveries inside federal bunkers.

Until someone snapped a photo of a water tower floating above the treeline in central Oregon.

Suddenly, anyone who could work a Bunsen burner and knew the Scientific Method seemed to want to learn the secrets of Gravity Falls. Physicists and mathematicians had been the ones to initially descend onto the county, eyes gleaming at the prospects of marketable wonder, but it was the naturalists who stayed. (Along with every crackpot theorist junk science could sneeze up.)

But then, Teller and Oppenheimer started bickering, McCarthy scared the crap out of Truman and the AEC, bombs got dropped in the tropics and in Russia, and the strangeness of Gravity Falls was altogether forgotten once more as the whole outside world scrambled to go nuclear.

Before, the town’s only claim to fame had been its nationally half-remembered history as being that place out in Nowhere, USA, where America’s silliest president had galloped a horse off of a cliff. But the weird little community, half-hidden in the pines, had a long history of overlooking the kinds of things most people thought could only come out of pulp fiction, or Hollywood.

Giant eyeballs. Prehistoric monsters. The kind of weird and pear-shaped dark energies H.P. Lovecraft mooned over in his dizziest of daydreams were nothing more than common facets of the local color. Affronts against nature were just part-and-parcel of their zip code.

About twenty years back, a small engineering research lab set up shop in Gravity Falls, and with the introduction of the color television (as well as a jerry-rigged radio tower), the little town way out in mountainous Nowhere became an overnight  _Somewhere_.

…As far as Stanford’s books told, at least.

Stanley didn’t really get most of the science-- it was all esoteric, lofty poindexter crap; theoretical shit about the conservations of energy, proposed ideas involving light quanta and magnetism, star alignments, and other bullshit. The only parts of the science curriculum which Stan actually remembered (from having been made to pass them in school) were the bits where he got to set things on fire, or smash/electrocute/explode vegetables. The rest of it usually leaked out of his ears over the summer, or got punched out in the boxing ring.

Still, Ford had been beside himself at the prospect of moving here. He’d rambled himself half-hoarse at Stan when he finally secured funding from the university; yammering excitedly about  _“The discoveries of a lifetime!”,_ and  _“…Seriously, I guarantee there’s something absolutely unseen out there in those mountains. If I could find it, it would revolutionize how we interact with our world!”_

Cheryl had already packed up the kids and settled into university housing in Portland by this point, so like a good brother, Stan had agreed to make the move with his twin.

Stanley didn’t really get anything out of it, himself, except a new altitude and a fresh start.

Maybe a change in setting could do his head some good.

_(It had to beat slinking around on fucking eggshells beneath his Pop’s judgmental stare at the pool hall all the damn time, if anything.)_

As he rode down the mountain into Gravity Falls proper, Stan glanced around at the scenery as much as he could. He’d spent the past couple of days at the cabin, helping Stanford organize his equipment and move stuff around, and hadn’t yet had a chance to properly explore.

The outside layer of the town was pretty built-up and looked more modernized than the interior; older brickwork and simplified facades painted a clear picture of how small Gravity Falls had once been, before all of the rural development. Stan saw more CAT tractors and rebar skeletons standing around this town than he’d ever seen in even a larger city. Someone seriously had plans for this place, and the dough to back them up.

Vehicular traffic wasn’t so bad within the inner neighborhoods, he found. But pedestrians-- really  _fucking weird looking_ pedestrians, Stan registered in absence --walked around everywhere. Seemed like the sidewalks were basically just suggestions to the locals.

Stan stopped at a red light, watching as a thirtysomething-looking man with a woodpecker perched on his shoulder ( _‘Seriously?’_ ) crossed the road in a practiced weave going between idling trucks. He wasn’t the only one doing this, either; an elderly couple just up and took a long, diagonal stroll from one corner of the intersection to the other, like it was a leisurely walk in a friggin’ park.

If this were Hamilton Ave back home, Stan thought, every single one of these people would be nothing but colorful smears on the pavement. You couldn’t even breathe towards a motorway in New Jersey if you were on foot. Crosswalks and streetlights existed for a reason, people. Anything else was just natural selection.

He shook his head at his own thoughts, kicking off from the road as the light turned green. _‘Yeesh.’_

Stan rode up a block before figuring he’d swing into the first empty spot he found. He dropped the kickstand and shut off the engine, pulling his road goggles off from over his glasses as he pocketed his keys.

The store he’d just parked in front of had a banner stretched across its main window advertising  ****NOW BACK IN STOCK: DIRTY GLASS**,** and  _“INSURE YOUR TOMATOES TODAY!”_

He couldn’t help his stare.

Where in the sweet fuck did Stanford just move them to?

He had his attention stuck on the weird signs, and wasn’t watching where he was putting his feet as he reflexively jumped up the curb from the road. Naturally, he slammed into something.

Stan stumbled back and hit the sidewalk with an  _“Oof!”_

He hissed, slowly pulling his hands back from where they’d braced his fall. The heels of his palms were skinned. A couple of his fingertips were torn a little. He hissed some more as he gingerly tried to wipe sand from the scrapes onto his jeans. Man, that trip was _rough_.

“HEY.”

It hadn’t been a wall, or even a lamppost he’d hit. It had been a man.

A  _huge_  man. A huge, furious looking man.

Stanley felt all color drain from his face as his mouth dropped open, minor injuries momentarily forgotten as he stared upwards into the eyes of the behemoth looming above him.

“Oh, shit.”

God, he had the crappiest luck.

The guy glared down at Stan with a teeth-bared grimace, absolutely petrifying the basest of all the boxer’s instincts. There was no way Stanley was going to get out of a fight with this hulk without at least three of his bigger bones snapped in half.

But then, the guy’s expression suddenly shifted into something a lot less bloodthirsty, though still just as unsettling. He stabbed a rolling pin-sized, gloved forefinger towards the direction of Stan’s motorcycle. Stanley’s eyes followed the motion.

The giant demanded, in a deep voice like a redwood ripping in half: “That your bike?”

Panic flared in Stanley like a white-hot splash of terror.

 

. . .

“Guess who got a job!” Stan announced, voice booming into the room.

Stanford was elbow-deep in unboxing some of his equipment, and glanced up at his brother with a distracted expression. “What?” He gently lifted out a strange apparatus of tubes and screw joints, and set it down onto the couch along the wall beside him. “What are you talking about, dude?”

“I have a new job!” Lee repeated, hands on his hips as he puffed out his chest in pride. “Yep, I’m gainfully employed,” he stated, chin jutted out cockily. “I’m gon’a make a ton of money and look super great doin’ it.”

“How in the hell did you get a job,” Ford asked absently as he pawed through packing peanuts. His own words seemed to catch up with his mind and he stopped, turning around to look over his shoulder where his twin was standing in the doorway. The researcher slid his glasses back up his nose, shuffling his knees around to properly acknowledge Stanley. “More importantly, what did you get hired to do? And, why?”

The grin that split his brother’s face was earnest and bright. “I thought he was going to murder me in the street, but then he gave me a job!” His eyes went a little unfocused in his glee. “I’m a bartender now!”

Stanford sighed. “Stanley, don’t fuck around,” he chided, turning back to his box, “come on, I’m busy.”

“I’m  _not_  fuckin’ around, you meatball,” Lee insisted, waving his hands as he spoke. “I rode into town to check the place out, like you suggested, and I stopped in front of this bar, right--”

Stanley moved further into his brother’s room, side-stepping boxes and stacks of books as he excitedly sat down on the end of the wall couch. “--And wouldn’t you know it, a guy who worked there liked my bike, and offered me a job!”

“That sounds…  _highly_  improbable, man,” Stanford countered, folding the flaps of the emptied box until they were tucked tightly over each other. He stood and walked over to his bed, picking up his pack of smokes and lighter from the nightstand.

Lee followed him as he left the bedroom and descended the stairs, still talking. “It’s true! And, if the guy  _hadn’t_  offered me a job,” his twin added, rounding the corner after Stanford did at the landing. Lee left the front door open, following the other onto the porch where Stanford had left his ashtray on the seat of a metal folding chair. “I would have just parked and gone off looking for one, anyway!” Stanley finished.  
  
Ford picked up the ashtray and sat down in the chair, setting the burgundy glass on his knee as he picked a new cigarette from his pack and stuck it in his lips. He flicked the Zippo and made quick work of lighting the end, puffing fast to make the cig burn in earnest. He exhaled bluish smoke from his mouth and nose, snapping the lid of the lighter closed with a metallic clink, and squinted up at his twin with a confused frown. “Why would you want to do that?” Ford asked.

Stanley leaned against the logged exterior of the cabin and crossed his thick arms over his chest. “I’m just thinking-- No, thanks,” he shook his head at the proffered cigarettes in his brother’s hand, and Stanford stuck the package into his T-shirt pocket. “I’m just thinking,” Lee continued. “This would be the easiest way for me to stay out’a your hair and out’a your way while you work,  _and_  I’ll be getting to know this town in the process.”

Ford pulled on his cigarette. “Yeah.”

“You know, like you were sayin’,” Lee reminded.

“I remember, bro,” Stanford assured, tapping ash off the end of his smoke.

He’d spent the drive over to Gravity Falls trying to pull Stanley out of the uncharacteristically quiet anxiety funk he’d noticed his twin had fallen into. The prospect of moving, leaving unfamiliar surroundings and stomping grounds for a whole new side of the country, even as a promise to his brother, had turned the playful, confident side of Lee-- the  _true side_ , Stanford thought; the one that unfortunately got regularly choked out by his brother’s insecurities --into this terrified, scattered ball of nerves.

They’d been alright at first, travelling down the East Coast, but once they swung over onto the westbound freeway, Stanley had started to shut down; like a delayed reaction, or something.

Stanford had tried to babble about whatever positive, encouraging thing he could think of the entire time he drove.

He was so used to taking care of his brother that most of it was reflex, all of the subjects falling along similar, uplifting veins of thought; literally whatever his mind could catch and spit out.

He hadn’t known Lee was even listening.

The air was warm and quiet, still hanging with heat from the sun of the day. Bugs made ambient buzzing in the yard.

“You’re not in my hair, Lee,” Stanford admitted.

His twin snorted. “I don’t even know what you  _do_ , Ford,”

“Yeah, but it’s nice having an extra set of hands around--”

Stanley dug after an itch inside his ear with an unimpressed look. “To break shit.”

“I know you don’t mean it,” Stanford returned, unphased by his brother’s offhand self-flagellation. “You can learn about this place without jumping the gun, dude. It’s going to take me a little bit to actually get settled into my experiments; I’m not going to just duck out tomorrow.” He drummed his fingers against his thigh. “Y’ain’t got’a got off and spend your time working for some stiff in town.”

“You’re  _busy_ ,” Lee emphasized, sibling exasperation out in full force. “You can’t be droppin’ everything to hold my fuckin’ hand like a child.  _Stan_. Come on.”

“I wasn’t trying to push you off into something drastic.”

Stanley heaved a giant, deliberate sigh. This was not going like he’d planned. The quick shot of fright from the lumberjack on the sidewalk earlier had almost made him tap out, but  _this_  bullshit was making him actively want to.

Stanford was worried about him, like always.

This time, however, Stan  _knew_  there was nothing to worry about.

For once,  _he_  could be the twin doing the assuring.

"You don’t have to work, you know," Stanford tried again. Apparently he wasn’t going to let it go. "It was just a thought. I’ve got enough in the bank, honestly, and if we budget, we could--"  
  
Stanley stood back upright, swinging his arms out and clapping a hand down onto his twin’s shoulder.

"Ford, it’s the perfect gig," he told. "Trust me. I checked it out. I get to be around booze all day,  _and_  get tipped to just stand there and look pretty. You know I like doin’ that.”

The researcher snorted back inside his throat, rolling his eyes. Stanley smiled at his brother. “Hey,” he said. “It’s’bout time I did a little adultin’ on my own, y’know?" He laughed, loud and easy. "I mean, finally do something  _legal_  and  _above-board_ , for once. Heh. Might even file a real W-2. Bet Pop would like that."

Stanley always felt at his most comfortable around Stanford, and talking about his new job while in his twin’s patient presence only bolstered the boxer’s resolve.

He could do this. He  _would_  do this. A fresh burst of his newfound confidence-- which blossomed on the ride back from his fall in the street --swelled in his chest, even as his father’s voice rang in his ears.

_‘Time to man up, Stanley.’_

“Plus,” Stanley added, matter-of-factly, “it’s not fair to Cheryl and the kids, bro. You’ve got a family to support, and that funding dough can only go so far, y’know?”

“Yeah, but--”

“You shouldn’t be paying for me when your wife is running after your rugrats with the same bank account, man. It’s just not right.”

Stanford pulled a long drag off of his cigarette, quietly mulling over his brother’s words. The researcher exhaled a cloud of blue smoke, and sighed.

This was what he’d been wanting, right? Wanting for Stanley to have a little more experience with people. Gain some more social independence. Rearranging faces in the boxing ring, or scamming idiots at the pool hall could only provide so many specialized interpersonal skills, he knew, and-- Their pop’s words suddenly echoed in Stanford’s head.

He couldn’t be his brother’s buffer forever.

He tapped ashes off the end of his cig.

Maybe he’d been being a little too overprotective. His brother was usually great around him, but then, they did also come out of the womb together. Theirs was a specialized sibling comfort. Stanford knew you couldn’t exactly expect someone as neuroatypical as Stanley Pines to translate the intimate calm of being with his twin into interacting with the rest of the world. Even if he was aware of his own issues.

But. Lee had to learn somehow, right?

Like a benediction, Stanford said: "Alright, Stan."

Stanley punched upwards and whooped, grinning widely. “Alright!”

"When do you start?"

"Man,  _tomorrow!"_  Lee shadow boxed with the air and laughed. "I’ll show you, bro, I promise!”

 

. . .

Dan Corduroy was a handful of years younger than him, but the guy was one of the biggest motherfuckers Stanley Pines had ever seen.

That first day on the street hadn’t been an overreaction on Stanley’s end. Dan was  _massive_. Towering somewhere around “moose” in both the height and bulk departments, it didn’t help that his resting face was apparently just an intractably rugged, gap-toothed glower with a beard hanging off of it.

The first time they’d spoken, Stan had been actively reminding himself to not pee his pants from intimidation and not say anything too stupid. But without thinking, Stanley had mentioned he was trying to find a job. Almost immediately, Dan had reached into his back pocket and pulled out a grimy business card, and thrust it into Stan’s palm with a thumb jerked over his shoulder towards the next building, offering a gruff:  _“Come back on Monday, and I’ll put you to work.”_

It turned out that the space right beside the weird “tomato insurance” store was home to a bar. A bar that this monolith of a human being happened to own.  
  
Stanley had felt lucky enough to fumble out a nervous line of thankyous before turning right back around and fleeing to his bike. That adage about gift horses rang in his head, and he took it as gospel.

In short, Dan was terrifying.

And… he was going to be Stanley’s boss.

 _‘Well,’_  the brunet thought to himself, waiting at the last light before 8 ½ ST, _‘I already promised Stanford.’_  He cranked the throttle for a moment, enjoying the obnoxious thunder of the engine as he watched the light flicker over the turning lane.

The last thing he wanted was to prove his brother right about something else. He wasn’t going to mess this up.

Stan rolled through traffic for a half a block and curved around into a small service alley. There was a wide enough space behind the building which housed the bar, and Dan was in the habit of wheeling his pickup truck into the space beside the dumpster. Stanley figured he could leave the Triumph back here, too. (He doubted anyone local was suicidal enough to touch anything on Dan Corduroy’s behemoth Dodge, and he hoped that once they learned Stan was working for Manly Dan, no one would boost his bike, either.)

He’d already pulled off his road goggles and was releasing the clutch when he caught Dan’s eyes. The connection made Stanley freeze, a hand halfway up to his face reaching out to adjust his glasses.

His boss was cleaning out a wooden keg with a garden hose near the bar’s back door; his massive hands making the hose look like a green shoelace.

Stan turned off the engine and reached back for his bag, still staring at Dan as he slowly moved.

The ginger seemed to glare at Stanley for a long moment, deep-set eyes dropping down to the Triumph before darting back up to Stan. Dan held the stare as he nodded.

It felt like he’d just passed some kind of weird, unknown test, and the relief that rushed up to buoy his shoulders as he dismounted made Stanley instantly feel comfortable.

“Sling your pack in the office,” Dan ordered, baritone like gravel rolling downhill, “and then get your ass behind the bar.”

Stan walked past and pulled open the door, calling out a bright: “You got it, chief!”

Apparently, Dan really liked Stan’s bike.

It was a good start.

 

. . .

The next week was spent as a crash-course in bartending. Dan didn’t believe in holding someone’s hand until they “perfected their mixology” before turning them loose to pour drinks; he told Stan as much through a disgusted snarl at the word  _mixology_  and a sharp order to “Just fuckin’ pour what the customer asks for, Pines. It’s alcohol. You don’t drink it to get anything out of it except a good, goddamned buzz.”

“You know there are, uh, wine connoisseurs,” Stanley had pointed out, immediately blanching as he realized his mouth had spoken without his thinking. He self-consciously coughed. “…And stuff,” he mumbled.

Dan had frowned like the thought was an affront against his entire being. “Those people don’t come here,” he stated heavily.

And that was the end of that.

The Gnarly Oak only kept stocks of the very basics in liquor, and the beer was plentiful, yet firmly domestic. Mixed drinks (outside of pouring liquor in a tumbler of Coca-Cola) were absolutely  _not_  on the menu. Stanley learned that the regulars apparently liked it that way, or just didn’t expect anything else.

Most of the people who came in to the bar asked for bottled beers, or dark alcohol with ice, so there hadn’t been any real speedbumps for him to have to work through. (There was one skinny little man named Tyler, though, who always came in and asked for a martini  _“In the fancy glass!”,_ and he had whined loudly about the lack of olives the first time Stanley had served him, but then Dan had suddenly appeared behind the bar with a toothpick skewered through an olive and plunked it into the gin without a word. Stan learned there was a small jar in the back of the refrigerator literally bought just for this one customer.)

The regulars were pretty alright, too. (Most of them thought he was funny, which pleased Stan to no end.)

Blubs, the city’s newly promoted sheriff, was a short, portly little guy with long, tight black ringlets, a positive outlook on life, and a pitiful tolerance for hard liquor. Susan, a waitress in a local diner, was polite albeit entirely too spacey, and she was sort of easy on the eyes (if you discounted her lazy one.) Preston was a garbage collector for the county and seemed dumber than a bag of doorknobs, but he always made sure to thank Stanley for his drinks, and whenever someone complimented the bowtie he wore in his long beard, the man would positively glow with happiness. And, Toby was a strange little fella with a face not even a mother could love, but he could put away more bourbon in his tiny body than Stanley had ever seen someone drink without barfing.

On an average day, Stan would be the only one tending-- Dan wasn’t always there; if he was, he usually only came out to the front to work the register or serve meat from the grill. But things did tend to pick up after dark, and the weekends were usually kind of swamped with weird creatures wandering out to drink, so a second bartender would step in and help Stan until last call.

If Stanford remembered he needed more than coffee and nicotine and sheer willpower to actually survive, then Stanley could expect to have an alright meal with his brother as he shared about his day.

He almost got clipped by a fucking Bentley the other night when he was trying to go through an intersection, but that was the most eventful thing that had happened yet. (It used to be seeing a Manotaur and a gnome have a drinking contest, but it turned out that  _that_ was actually a regular occurrence in this town, so Stanley got over it quickly.)

It was pretty easy work, to be honest. Dan let him keep all of his tips, and told Stan he’d get paid once a month, in cash.

(An off-hand grumble about how the taxman could bite Corduroy’s  _“red-haired asshole”_ had Stanley instantly launching into a boast about how he’d once combed through books at the library for a solid 48 hours, looking for every loophole he could use to keep from paying his taxes. At the end of his story, Dan had clapped a hand like a dinner plate on Stan’s back, damn near winding him as result, and laughed. “I knew I liked you,” the ginger had told. When he could breathe properly again, Stan had laughed, too.)

After that first week, Stanley really felt like he was starting to get a handle on things. Stanford even seemed satisfied with the pace of his new research.

“I’ll have to meet this guy,” Ford had commented, a pen getting clicked to death in one of his hands as his other twiddled with the dials of a flat kind of computer. “You don’t crow about strangers unless you just punched them or robbed them.”

“Dan’s the best,” Stanley had said through a mouthful of casserole. “Still scary as fuck, though, but he’s cool. I don’t feel the reflex to wet myself when he speaks anymore, either.” Stan scooped more potatoes into his mouth and continued: “Everyone at the bar is cool. That place is great. They come in, they get drunk, they leave me their money. It’s the perfect set-up. I don’t have to get close, I don’t have to do anything except keep the booze flowing.”

“Mhmm,” Stanford hummed, writing neat lines of data in a brand new red journal.

“I’m getting all the social interaction I could want without risking my knuckles  _or_  my teeth!”

“Or a life in prison,” his twin muttered.

“Hey, I got  _out_ ,” Stanley countered, faux pouty.

That fresh start he had been wondering about seemed to have arrived.

Never had he been so glad that a terrifying stranger had stopped him in the street.

 

. .::. .

 

It was a pretty slow Wednesday afternoon when someone slid onto a barstool while Stanley was wiping out a line of freshly washed Weizens.

Without looking up, he asked: “What can I get for you?”

There was a beat of silence. And then: “…You’re new here, right?”

Stan looked up, unconsciously stuffing the towel into the glass in his fist as he adjusted his glasses.

Sitting directly across from him, on the last stool at this end of the bar, is a man. Kind of on the shrimpy side, wearing rounded glasses that create a look reminding Stanley of his brother.  _‘Another nerd,’_  he observes absently.

“Uhh…” He grabs the buffing rag again, remembering the guy’s words. “Yeah, I am.” He rings the towel around the lip of the glass.

“Just moved here, hmm?”

There’s a drawl curling around the vowels _. ‘That accent is not from Oregon.’_

“Yeah, uh,” Stanley says. “With my brother.”

The man moves his hands up from his lap, resting his forearms against the bar. “That is interestin’.”

Stan’s eyes immediately lock on to the metal _. ‘Dude.’_

“Whoa!” He spouts, staring at the hand. “That is  _wild!_  Is it a glove?”

The man’s brow crinkles a bit, but not in an angry way. “It’s a prosthesis,” he explains, voice patient. “My right hand was injured in a car accident some years ago.”

Almost instantly, Stanley feels like the worst kind of putz, and he knows his cheeks must be flushing red. “Oh. Damn. I’m, uh.” He falters, looking down at the glasses behind the bar, rubbing the towel over the one he’s holding in a kind of repetitive, nervous motion. “I’m sorry about that.”

When he glances up again, he finds the man is watching him intently with an expression of controlled, fascinated amusement. “Don’t be,” he tells, smiling slightly. “I’m quite proud of it. I made it myself, you see.” He turns over the hand in question, showing off the jointed palm, and rolling its fingers and thumb in a dexterous, fluid wave, moving as easily as if it were real flesh and bone. “I’m an engineer.”

Something about the way this man is looking at him makes Stan a weird kind of nervous, and it puts a tension in his gut he doesn’t quite understand.

“That’s-- That’s cool,” he tries, finally putting down the glass and grabbing up a new one. Stanley clears his throat, loud and deliberate, and asks: “Well, uh. What can I get for you?”

The man just looks at him again, making Stan almost convinced he wasn’t going to answer until he said: “Three fingers of whiskey, please. Neat. Whatever you have that’s the strongest would be preferable.”

“Right,” Stan said, instantly walking away. He finds a whiskey bottle on the top shelf with some ridiculous proof printed on the label, and figures that will do. He pours it into a clean tumbler and sets it down on a fresh coaster in front of the engineer right as he sees Blubs lean over the bartop down at the other end, trying to pull up the door to the beer fridge behind the counter.

“BLUBS!  _Hey_ ,” Stanley shouts, pointing a thick finger at the cop, frowning a threat as he walked off. “You know you’re over your limit…”

 

. . .

He’d almost been working at The Gnarly Oak for a solid month, and things were mostly the same as when he’d started. Except for one thing.

Well, it wasn’t really A Thing, but.  _But_.

Stanley doesn’t know what to think of the skinny nerd at the end of the bar.

He doesn’t know why he’s been noticing him so much.

It was probably the staring that did it.

The guy doesn’t look like a lot, if Stanley was going to be critical-- Weak-chinned, floppy hair greying at the temples, and he still looked too thin and lanky despite the expert cut of that fancy-ass suit he usually wore. Dan Corduroy had offhandedly mentioned (after Stan had roundabout hinted a question of his identity) that the guy was something of a local bigwig, and basically owned half the town.

He doesn’t really do anything when he comes in, and he comes in almost every day.

He’ll show up in the late afternoon, order three fingers of the house’s strongest scotch whiskey, and then just nurse the glass for a little over an hour. He was quiet, and didn’t bother any of the other patrons whether or not they recognized him.

Stanley knew he was kind of slow on the uptake, and didn’t read interpersonal signals very well, but he had no clue how he’d missed those calm blue eyes following his every move as he worked, or joked with the customers, or griped at Dan.

The first time he’d noticed, Stan had caught the thin guy’s gaze, and  _he_  had had to look away-- because the other man hadn’t even blinked.

It was like he’d been waiting for Stan to catch him watching.

Stanley didn’t care if he was the king of goddamned Egypt; something…  _something_  about him just, just fucking left him on  _edge_. The focus, the sheer, single-minded attention in the nerd’s gaze was brand new territory for Stanley.

Blubs, he could laugh with. Tyler, he could laugh with. Even Dan, sometimes, if Stanley was feeling especially brave that day. But not this regular, no. Something about talking to him made every gleeful breath that might have been building in his throat just disappear.

Nobody looked at him like that before.

 

. . .

“So, you’re here in town for business?” the guy asked, “or pleasure?”

Stan was pouring a fifth of whiskey, and glanced up at the engineer for a second, the question making his face contort. “Uh, neither?” He capped the bottle and returned it to the shelf. “I guess… Family. Is that option C? Can I still go with ‘neither’?”

The man smiled, showing a mouth full of straight, beautiful teeth. “It can be Option C, sure.”

“Then, that’s it,” Stan said, moving to push a coaster towards the woman who just sat down a few stools to the right. “My brother thinks this town is special, or…” Stan scratched at his stubble. “…Something. He’s recording shit for science.”

“And you’re here to keep him company.” The guy brushed his human hand through his hair, leaning back on his seat. “That’s mighty nice. You must have a kind heart.”

Heat climbed into his cheeks. “Um.”

There was a clatter to his right.

Thank god part-time bartender Edwin Durland couldn’t work an ice maker to save his life, or Stan would have had to continue the conversation.

But the questions didn’t end, no matter what bullshit was going down in the bar.

Yesterday it was: “Does your brother work as hard as you do?”, and today was a loaded: “Did your girlfriend move here with you?”

Stan couldn’t help but feel he was being  _tested_.

 

. .::. .

 

His name was  _McGucket_. Fiddleford McGucket, and he practically built this town, Stanley learned. He felt like he’d finally been initiated into some open secret.

Stanford knew all about him. Apparently, his net worth was something up into the kind of digits that made Stan’s brain want to explode.

Holy shit.  _Holy shit._

All that week, Stanley couldn’t stop thinking about the trail of very literal zeroes that probably followed the shorter man’s name wherever it got printed.

Stan went through the motions of pulling a pint as he thought.

Why would someone like  _that_  keep asking someone like  _Stan Pines_  about himself? He was no one special. He had a twin, but millions of people had twins. He owned a motorcycle, and he could punch people pretty good. And, maybe he could dance a little. But that was it.

Lee had told him some things about McGucket Laboratories; the company was benevolent in practice but vicious in conduct. MGL had a prominent, shameless habit of going after competitors and dragging them through the mud. If one group made a bell, MGL would come along and make a similar bell, but  _better_. It would muscle out competition like the biggest monkey shoving away all the smaller monkeys from the best food. MGL was the head monkey, and it was adamant about building a better mousetrap. Or something.

At least, that’s how Stanford had worded it.  _“A better mousetrap.”_

Stanley didn’t know shit about mousetraps. Or energetic mutations, or paranormal laylines manifesting physical distortions, or whatever the fuck else Ford had said.

Stan found himself lying awake at night, borderline obsessed.

He wasn’t… He wasn’t  _special_. He didn’t have anything to offer to someone like that, someone that important; not even as their bartender.

Maybe he was just bemused by the attention.

 _Nobody_  looked at him like that before.

 

. .::. .

 

McGucket tosses back the whiskey pooling at the bottom of the glass, licking his lips with a hidden wince as he sets the tumbler back down.

Stan’s busing away a nearby group of glasses and damp cardboard coasters when McGucket smoothly opens his wallet, counts out four notes, and folds them together at the middle. He’s slipping the money beneath his own glass and coaster when Stanley returns with his receipt.

“Don’t think I won’t,” Stan laughs in warning, looking back over the bar to where Beardy is trying to wave him off. “I will fleece the _hooves_  off you, dude, do  _not_  tempt me.”

He looks back towards McGucket, and the brightness in his expression dims a little, instantly replacing itself with self-conscious awkwardness. He hands the receipt out towards the engineer. “Here’s your cheque, it’s the same as…” Stan’s eyes catch sight of the green corners poking out from under McGucket’s tumbler, and his words die in his throat.

McGucket takes the receipt from Stan with one hand while pulling another bill from his wallet with his other. He gives them both to Stanley, who can’t hide the look of hesitant confusion as his dark eyes move from the money in his hand to the money folded away.

The corners of at least two of the bills that he can see from this angle both read $50.

A neat glass of whiskey is only $4.

McGucket taps a silver finger twice on the bar beside the half-hidden money. “I want you to keep this,” he tells.

“Uh,” Stanley intelligently replied, still looking at the fifties.

The smaller man smiles. “With tax factored in, there won’t be any use tryin’ t’keep what’s left from that cheque as tip,” he explains. “Nothing but coins in a pitiful amount.  _This_  is your tip.” He makes a small gesture at the money with his prosthetic hand, stretching the fingers back into an open, welcoming fan.

Without prompting, Stan sets aside the receipt and grabs the empty glass and coaster, picking up the other bills and murmuring a quiet, unconscious swear as he counts it.  _‘Holy shit.’_ He counts it again, and again, feeling his hands shake a little with excitement _. **‘Holy shit.’**_

“…This is three hundred dollars,” Stanley states. He looks up at McGucket then, and feels his stomach squirm at the steady, blue-eyed gaze.

“You  _deserve_  it,” the engineer states seriously. There’s a kind of intelligent focus in his eyes, a probing attention that makes Stanley swallow heavily and his face heat up. He looks back at the bartop, coughing self-consciously as he adjusted his glasses; suddenly very aware of how awkward he felt.

But, apparently McGucket didn’t care. He makes to stand from his stool, adjusting the fit of his suit jacket with careful tugs on his sleeves.

Stanley never realized how… much smaller than him the other man actually was.

Would McGucket really only reach up to his shoulder?

“Don’t think about it too much,” McGucket tells. “I’m always happy to give my money to someone so pleasin’.”

Stanley looks up again just long enough to catch McGucket’s gaze drop down to his mouth, and then travel back to his eyes. Like responding to a signal he doesn’t understand, Stan freezes, his heart hammering.

And then McGucket is gone.

The money is crisp in his fingers and shuffles over itself with a papery rustling.  _‘What, did McGucket just get this cash from a bank?’,_ he thinks, surprised by how awed he felt.

Stanley rarely saw bills this nice. Even back in Jersey, he hardly ever got his hands on money this clean. The ink was vibrant, and there weren’t any of those miscellaneous fluid stains or little tears along the edges you usually found on old bills. This cash was  _fresh_ , possibly even recently printed.

Curious, Stan brought the money up to his nose and sniffed. It didn’t have that sweet smell of much-handled dough yet, either.

And it was all for him.

“Fuck are you doing, Pines?” Dan growls from the other end of the bar. “Blubs is bitchin’ ‘bout not being seen.”

Stanley deftly folds the money up into a tight line and sticks it in his front pocket. “I’m comin’,  _geez_ ,” he calls back, empty of all real bluster. Something in him feels kind of drained. “Keep your shirt on.”

 

. . .

Of course. Of  _course_ , and just as he was getting bored.

Of course someone like  _that_  would just magically show up in this town, and magically start working in the same crappy little dive bar he liked to slum around in. And magically seem just as fucking innocent and sweet as he liked them.

Don’t even get him started on that body,  _sweet lord_. Had someone been reading his diary? Damn.

If Fiddleford still believed in god, he would have gone and gotten dunked in the fucking river all over again just because of Stanley Pines seemingly being served up for him on a silver platter.

But,  _god_ , he was cute. Young, younger than Fiddleford, sure. What a face, jesus, what a  _gorgeous face_. A jawline to go mad for, a strong nose, a strong chin,  _pretty_  dark brown eyes, and a dark shadow of not-quite-stubble that never really left, no matter how recently Fiddleford could tell he’d tried to shave. He had that thick, beautifully solid shoulder-to-waist ratio of a prizefighter, and long, slim legs. Not much a white T-shirt and blue jeans could hide, honestly.

 _Pines_. Fidds was pretty sure he was Jewish.

So he was probably hung like a horse, too.

Now,  _that_  was a fun thought. Fiddleford liked to revisit it as often as he could, usually as he let his eyes trail around after Stanley’s broad back moving behind the bar.

This was going to be fun. It was already fun, but Fiddleford felt like whatever was coming next was going to prove to be a goddamned _blast_.

He just had to be patient. Take it slow. Stanley was obviously awkward, socially, and hadn’t caught how Fiddleford had been blatantly eyeing him until a few days ago, so Fidd didn’t think he would have to be too subtle. Just keep his attention open for opportunity.

In the meantime, he wondered how much he could get the other man to let slip about his life.

 

. . .

That night, Stan pulls out the cigar box from under his mattress and carefully stacks the money in with the other “tips” McGucket has given him.

He’s wriggling down into bed and pulling off his glasses as he starts to think.

If all he had to do was pour the billionaire a drink a few times a week to get  _this_  kind of scratch, Stanley wondered if feeling shy about the weird, personal questions McGucket sometimes asked him was nothing more than an overreaction.

He was just doing his job, and nothing but. The man was just a customer. Stanley was just being his bartender, same thing he was being for anyone else who walked into The Gnarly Oak.

Stanford always told him that he didn’t have to do anything for anyone he didn’t like.

And that Stanley didn’t have to like anyone he didn’t feel was worth it.

He shut his eyes.

Yeah, he could handle this.

 

. .::. .

 

Stan had been off his game all fucking day.

He’d been tense, shoulders locked. His stupid hands shook. He’d even dropped a pint, wasting a shitload of good beer on the floor.

At this rate, when McGucket finally came by, Stan would probably accidentally spill his whiskey in his lap instead of setting it down on the bartop like a normal fucking human would.

The thought of the engineer made Stanley lean his head forward, pressing it against the cool glass front of the bottle fridge. He was dreading having to wait on the other man if he came in today.

_God. damn._

He had a problem.

Apparently, his body had decided the best way to handle its awkward confusion about being subject to McGucket’s attentions was through… A hot blush spread like a tattletale across his face.

He hadn’t done anything new, or anything he hadn’t been doing in the shower since he’d learned how at age 13. All men had the same ritual, he figured (as long as their cock worked, that is.) Wake up, get out of bed, head to the bathroom. Choke the chicken. Easy.

Masturbation was something he did every day, and usually without much visual aid. Muscle memory, you know? Half the time, he didn’t really have to think about it to get the job done.

He’d had the water running, hitting nice and warm onto his back, and a hand braced against the wall next to the tub. Water and precum had gathered enough under his thumb and dragged back under his palm to ease his strokes. He would pull back on the top of his glans as he built himself up, closing his eyes as his mind ran through everything he thought was attractive. How someone smiled, that was a good one; dimples, lips pulling apart to show teeth, maybe it was during a laugh--

Yesterday, Chutzpah had been beaten by gnomes in a game of pool, and the resulting whiny pouting fit the Manotaur had thrown had made McGucket laugh this loud, ringing peal. Stan had thought the engineer’s lips were thin, but stretched wide as he laughed, they didn’t look thin at all. Laugh lines had sprung up like handsome grooves around his mouth, curling crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes behind his glasses.

A hot throb pulsed into his groin at the image and Stan gasped. His hand worked faster, fist moving as he picked up the rhythm of real arousal.

His voice, though; that accent. Southern, some kind of honest, drawling backwoods. A needy clench bent at Stanley’s middle, and his feet spread his stance a little wider, gritting a moan through his teeth.  _Sofuckingcute_.

Shit, now he was--

Now he couldn’t stop thinking about him.

He could see it now, how McGucket was handsome; he was pale, slim faced, that hair was way too floppy to belong on a middle-aged man and not look ridiculous. It was probably soft, if he ran his hands through it--

He felt his balls get tighter, his thighs tensing. A groan slipped past his teeth and hit the tub basin like a yell.

_McGucket was slender, he only came up to Stan’s shoulder, Stanley could probably wrap his hands around all of him--_

A hoarse, quick scream was all the sound he made as he fell over the edge, thrusting into his fist as his mind went white and his body took over.

He hadn’t come that fast in a while. He hadn’t come that  _hard_  in a while.

When his wits returned to him, Stanley felt something heavy and cold burrow right beneath his ribs.

_‘…Oh no.’_

And that’s where he’d stayed, all day--  _Oh no, oh no, oh no_ , stuck on that level of side-blinded dread repeating over and over in his mind like the worst kind of mantra.

Stanley grit his teeth.

He’d  _just gotten_  comfortable here, damn it. In this place, in this atmosphere. He knew who he was in this bar, serving the drinks, making nice with the regulars, tricking drunk people to tip him better. Becoming cripplingly attracted to one of the richest, and most influential patrons was not something he’d been prepared for.

He didn’t think he could handle it.

Maybe, if he ignored it, if he ignored  _McGucket_ \-- then, he might be okay.

Stanley needed to stay okay.

 

. .::. .

_[THREE DAYS LATER]_

 

Fucking frog-jumping Moses.

The rain hadn’t let up at _all_  from the downpour it was this morning. Dan had bitched about the weather scaring off customers, but Stanley had been more worried about how he was going to make it home.

Tyler came in for a martini around 2PM, talking about a big problem at the bus depot. Apparently, the only four buses that served Gravity Falls proper had all developed simultaneous infestations of engine possums, and gnomes had crawled up into the drive shaft of the bus serving the southern strip-- home of The Gnarly Oak.

If Stan couldn’t take the bus, he knew he sure as hell couldn’t get a ride from anyone at the bar; he lived too far out of the way, and the outside roads got way too muddy with this much rain. (Dan had told him as much when he decided they’d close early, a half-pitiful look tossed to Stan as the bartender grimaced at the weather beyond the window.)

Stan pulled his jacket up tighter around his ears, looking out into the bleak, waterlogged street beyond the pub steps.

He could always call Stanford, but sometimes his brother got so deep “in the zone” with his research that a jet engine could be taking off in the next fucking room and Ford wouldn’t hear it, much less hear the pitiful ringing of the cabin’s landline.

Stanley checked his watch, gut going tight with a small amount of anxiety.

It was way too late to try and call Stanford; damn poindexter always did his best and most engrossed level of work in the evening.

He scoffed to himself, adjusting his glasses with a sulking pout.  
Should have just risked his neck on the bike.

“Stanley!”

The bartender blinked. A black Bentley  _(‘…Do I know that car?’)_  had rolled up beside the curb. Its passenger’s side window was down, so Stan took a short step forward to the edge of the stoop to bend down to look in at the driver.

Stanley felt his mouth go dry.

It was McGucket.  
  
“D’ya need a ride?” The man asked, voice raised to be heard over the rain.

“Uhh,” Stanley tried, “That’s nice of you, uh, sir-- but--”

“This rain is awful, Stanley,” McGucket called out. As if on cue, a clap of thunder deafened them both for a second. “And I know you live too far away to walk. I insist.”

From what he could see, McGucket’s car looked warm and dry, and beautifully expensive.

The older man made a beckoning motion with his silver right hand. “Come on, now. You got to be cold, standin’ out there.”

Stanley didn’t need to be told twice.

He crouched down quickly into the car after pulling the door open, yanking it shut behind himself as he exhaled. “Wow, thanks,” he said, moving his bag from his shoulder to the floorboard.

“My pleasure,” McGucket chimed back pleasantly. He steered away from the curb and merged into traffic.

Stan was right. The interior of the Bentley  _was_  expensive. Wood inlayed dashboard, chrome dials for an absurdly powerful looking radio, and-- He wriggled a moment in his seat, reaching back to pull the seatbelt across himself. Man, this upholstery was incredible; butter-soft leather, good god. Ford’s Cadillac was a beauty, sure, but in comparison this Bentley was a damned  _queen_.

“Your car is gorgeous,” Stanley blurted. Almost as soon as he heard his own voice, Stan remembered where he was. Who he was riding with. ‘ _Geez, Stan, way to prove you’re not a moron,’_ he chastised himself.

McGucket just smiled. “You must have good taste, then,” he commented. “It  _is_  a lovely vehicle.”  
  
The Bentley left the main boulevard and turned onto the old highway going towards the cabin.

“Are you settlin’ into Gravity Falls well, Stanley?” McGucket suddenly asked.

“Uh, yeah.” Stan swallowed, clearing his mouth. He pushed up his glasses. “It’s alright.”

“It’s a fine town, if you know how to look at it,” McGucket stated.

“Yeah, Stanford-- My, uh. My brother. Stanford thinks it’s an interesting place. Laylines and strange anomalies in energy or whatever, he was tryna talk at me about it the other day.”

McGucket inquired: “What does your brother do, again?”

“He’s a physicist,” Stanley said. “I’m not-- Heh. I’m, uh, not real sure  _what_  he does, exactly. Kind’a…” He wiggled a hand sideways above his lap. “He’s kind’a above me, brain-wise in that stuff.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” McGucket countered. By now, the car was travelling down the long, wooded stretch heading towards the cabin, and the rain was like a gloomy veil against the already dark treeline.

“It’s true,” Stan told. He found his mouth working easier now that the subject was on Stanford, and not him. “We’re twins, but Stanford is brilliant. Like, academically. He’s got all these scientific talents, and the most I can do is count money.” The last bit of this was said with a kind of defeated resolve; Stanley had been down this same road before many times all throughout gradeschool.

He knew  _he_  wasn’t the twin deserving any laurels.

“Science  _is_  highly important,” McGucket imparted, voice matter-of-fact. “But you have plenty of pleasin’ characteristics, Stanley. I promise you this. Don’t sell yourself so short. ”

Stanley blinked. That was unexpected. The words kept heat crawling up his neck.  
  
Stan swallowed. “Uh, ehh. Mister McGucket--”

“ _Please_ ,” the engineer drawled, sounding politely put-upon, “call me Fiddleford.”

“Alright, Fiddle-- Fid--”

McGucket adjusted his grip on the steering wheel to guide it with his left hand, and moved his right to settle calmly on Stan’s closest knee.

Stan’s lungs deflated with a soft, surprised exhalation, and his tongue dropped like a wet rag in his mouth.

_‘Holy Moses.’_

The prosthetic hand was cool against his jeans, but Stan would have sworn it burned.

“…F-Fiddleford,” Stan whispered.

The whole time, the older man hadn’t taken his eyes off of the road. But now he looked over at Stan, just for a second, grinning. “See? That’s much better.”

His gut made a warm, tight clench at the smile, and Stanley tried to subtly shift his posture without dislodging Fiddleford’s hand. He slouched a bit more, discreetly stretching out his legs in the footwell to give his crotch a little extra room.

He’d been sporting a semi since he’d sat down, and was now absolutely terrified he’d accidentally spring up and pitch a fucking tent right there if that hand moved at all.

_‘Stupid tight pants.’_

The bend for 618 Gopher Rd blends into the open edge of the property clearing, marked only by the faded cabin plaque nailed to the big pine serving as acreage marker. Stanley can just make out the blurred, distant shape of his brother standing on the porch beyond the wet distortion of rain.

“I should really send a crew up here to pave this road,” Fiddleford mutters, slowing the Bentley until it moved only at a crawl.

“Um.” Stanley said. “Yeah, that’d-- that’d help a lot.”

“How muddy does the dirt get up by the steps?” Fiddleford asked as he pulled his hand back to rest on the shifter. “I don’t want to get stuck. Should I stop here?”

“Uh, well, if you don’t wan’a risk it, just--” Stanley leaned forward to look out the windshield, recognizing the red shape of where the Stanmobile had been parked. “--Just,” he gestured towards the Cadillac. “Yeah, here’s good, Stanford wouldn’t park here if he couldn’t get it out later.”

Fiddleford hummed, pushing forward on the shift to settle them into park. “Observant,” he remarked. “I like that in a man.”

Stanley wasn’t expecting the warm flush of flattered pride that welled in his chest.

Rain pattered down over the Bentley. Neither of them spoke.

Fiddleford glanced into his rearview mirror. “Will you be able to make it alright?” There was still some distance from where Stanford had parked his Cadillac, and the front door of the cabin. “I can reverse, maybe get a bit closer.”

“Yeaahh, uhh,” Stanley drawled, thinking about it. He checked the mirror himself, and turned around to look past the headrest through the back windshield. He squinted a little, and pushed his glasses back up the arch of his nose as he righted himself in the seat. “No, I think I’ll be fine--”

“Oh, good.”

McGucket’s hand was back on Stan’s knee. Whatever blood had bloomed in his ribs to bring that feeling of flattery suddenly shot back down to his groin, threatening erection in the worst way.

“I have a request.” The hand was slowly  _petting his knee._

Stan gulped.

Fiddleford was looking forward as he said: “Y’all are new in town, so I’m not too sure if you knew, but the 4th of July festival ‘round here is a big deal. A fair trucks in, tourists come up, there’s food, rides, the whole ball o’ wax.” He looked over at Stanley as he stopped his hand.

Stan was wide-eyed and still, hanging onto Fiddleford’s every word despite himself.

Fiddleford smiled. “I’d really like for y’all to come. My comp’ny hosts the whole shindig. I guarantee it’ll be worth the time.”

“That’s, uh, yeah.” Stan swallowed, blinking a couple times as he found his voice. “That’s a good idea…”

“If not for anything else but to get to know the local community, there’s quite a few…” Fiddleford paused, wrinkling his chin as he pursed his lip in thought for a second. “ _Distractions_ , to see and do that don’t come ‘round these parts so often.” He gave Stan’s knee a mild, firm squeeze and relished the quiet squeak the younger man made under his breath. “Your brother has a wife and child who live in state, right?”

“ _Yes_ ,” came the weak reply.

“Tell him about it, then. I’m sure he’d love a night off.”

And then the hand was gone again, and Stanley remembered how to breathe.

He reached down to his pack between his feet, grabbing it in his arms. “Alright, well. Uhh…” He put a hesitant hand on the doorhandle, gathering courage to glance back at Fiddleford one last time. It didn’t last long, because he felt himself already starting to blush. “Uhm, I’m gon’a… I’m gon’a go.”

Stan opened the car door and stood quickly, but just before he could close it, Fiddleford called out: “Have a good night, Stanley.”

He spent a long, heavy second in place, feeling rain roll down his neck; before he shut the passenger’s side and jogged away to the cabin.

The rain was a damned shame, no matter how lucky, because it kept Fiddleford from watching for very long as Stanley went away.  
  
When he was sure the younger man had made it to the house, Fiddleford ratcheted the shifter out of park and rolled the car around back towards the road.

 

. . .

Stanford watched as the fancy black car pulled away from his Caddy and left the property. “Was that who I think it was?” He asked, just as Stanley was stomping mud from his shoes on the mat.

“Depends, if you think things that are terrible,” Lee mumbled, slinging his knapsack up onto a shoulder. He ran a hand back through his short hair, shaking off water from his grip with a grimace.

Stanford stubbed out his cig against a support beam and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Is he terrible, then?”

Stanley pulled the door open and walked into the front room. “Oh, come off it.”

“No, really.”

A loud, dramatic sigh. “He offered to drive me home instead of taking the bus,” Lee told, like it was a big hassle to admit.

“Doesn’t sound terrible, bro-bro.”

Stanley didn’t answer, just continued through to the kitchen, going immediately for the refrigerator. Stanford had noticed the tight set of his twin’s shoulders when he came up, and gave him a little space. He didn’t even bitch when he saw Stanley pull out the milk carton and immediately swig from the spout, giving a pleased sigh before putting the carton back, sans lid.

Stanford made a mental note to go back and cap it later; he had a feeling Stanley wanted to talk about something.

He was  _not_  disappointed.

"He put his hand on my knee."

Stanford's eyebrows shot up. "What?"

Lee bumped the fridge closed with his hip, gesturing vaguely at his left leg. "Hand. On my  _knee_."

Stanford scratched his stubble, eyes going unfocused as he looks off, thoughtful. "Damn."

But his twin interprets it as judgment.

Stanley  _frowns_. "I didn't know what to do!" He squawks, defensive. "I mean, it was  _his_  car, it was raining out, I didn’t wan’a seem like a jerk..."

“I’m not judging you, Lee,” Stanford soothed, trying to be as calm as he felt his brother needed. Stanley gave him a kind of queasy look, a nervous sideways twist of his lips with a grimace pinching around his eyes, before bending the expression back into an irritated frown, flapping his hands towards Ford with a dismissive “ _Feh_.” He straightened up his knapsack from where it hung at the crook of his elbow, but he used a little more force than was necessary, knocking a few papers and a Smez dispenser to the floor as he left the kitchen.

Stanford made a similar frown as he left his seat and followed his brother, taking a moment to pick up the mess and put it back on the counter.

He found Stanley in the living room, grumbling to himself as he moved books from the yellow armchair, stacking them on the floor beside. “Hey, watch how you handle that stuff, Lee,” Stanford chided, “A couple of those books are irreplaceable first editions I’m borrowing from the university.”

His twin took that exact moment to pause, large hands wrapped around the sides of two thick books held together, and stared right into his brother’s eyes as he unbent his fingers with a puerile “ _Whoops_ ”, letting the books tumble to the floor in a dusty, page-curling heap. Stanford bit the inside of his cheek as he returned the expression.

 _‘Well, at least he’s more like himself,_ ’ the researcher thought absently.

“So,” Stanford began, “your knee. McGucket’s hand.”  
  
“ _Oy_ , this guy.” Stanley muttered, toeing the books further away from the chair. “Never lets up, he does.”

“I’m just saying, it’s kind of a big thing.” Stanford observed his twin, matching up detail with memories of Lee’s anxieties. This didn’t seem like an “invasion of personal space” kind of anxiety, or really even a “confused by social interaction” kind, either. Stanley was _defensive_ , avoidant.

“It would have been crappy to walk home in the rain, yeah,” Stanford added, migrating over to his research spread out on the card table in the corner. “But if you’d needed to, I know you could have broken that hand just as easily as you left it there.”

“I didn’t  _leave it there_ ,” Lee cut in, looking up at the wall as he made his words ring loud. “I  _told_  you already: I was riding in his car, on _his_  charity, what? You wanted me to break his wrist and schlep up here like a waterlogged shmuck? Is that what you wanted to happen to your poor old brother?”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Ford said, rolling his eyes. “You know what I mean, you putz. We aren’t on the playground anymore, brother. You don’t have to let anyone get away with--”

His twin shot an annoyed, dangerous look at him, suddenly snapping:  _“So what if he makes me feel things?!”_

Stanford’s eyebrows rose. _‘Theeere it is.’_

“…He makes you  _feel_  things?”

Lee’s face froze, mind obviously working frantically to backtrack and register what he’d said. The red blooming onto his cheeks and crawling up his neck told Stanford the moment it finally did. “…T-that’s none of your business, bub!” Stanley tried, voice valiantly failing to not go too high. His hands flapped, and he shuffled a little in place as he spoke. “Everyone feels things, I’m not special! Th-This ain’t a big deal!”

“For you, Stanley, it is!” Stanford interjected.

Lee scoffed, completely on the defensive. “Pffft.  _Whaaat?!”_

Sometimes, being the reasonable one was a fucking pain. “You’ve never been with a man, and you like this man. It’s a big deal!” Stanford insisted. “And you get in your own way so fucking often, Stanley,  _shit_.”

Stanley stared, jaw working as he twisted his lips around, still frowning.

“And then you worry and beat yourself up when things go wrong, and things only went wrong because you got in your own  _way_ , man,” Stanford finished, his deep voice going kinder in cadence near the end.

He knew what he was referencing was one of his brother’s hardest truths, and didn’t want to scare him off. The last time he’d approached this as candidly, Lee had refused to speak to him for a week. Or remember to eat.

Stanley plopped heavily into the yellow armchair, clearly emotionally drained. He took a moment to sigh and adjust his glasses, before he started yanking out the knots at his ankles and kicking off his shoes.

“I mean,  _regardless_. It’s obvious I should just ignore him, right?” he stated. He shucked off his wet jacket and draped it with his knapsack on the fiberglass skull. “That’s… That’s a lot to fling at a man, you know. Even if it was just a hand.” He made a nervous bark of laughter. “I mean, I don’t even  _know_  the guy!” Leaning forward, he pawed at his shoes until they were back near his socked feet, and he gathered them up to rest together on his knees. "Like, I know he drinks scotch, and is ridiculously rich, but other than that-- bupkes."

His brother watched with a pensive quiet as the little ritual unfolded.

For a while, the only sounds were Stanley’s socked toes shuffling at the carpet, and muffled creaking of the old pipes in the walls.

"I think it'd be good for you, Lee,” Stanford finally admitted.

His twin stared at him. “ _What_.”

“I mean-- Maybe you should get to know him.”

Lee’s mouth bent into an unhappy frown.

“MGL is a solid company,” Stanford continued, ignoring Stanley’s glare, “for the most part, anyways. And Fiddleford McGucket is a brilliant engineer. I mean, if you were to have any man interested in you, I don't think you could do better than someone like him.” The researcher peeled off a can of beer from a half-empty sixpack, and watched as Stanley looked back at his shoes. “I don’t think anyone doing the kind of science his company does can be all that bad, is all I’m sayin’.” Stanford cracked the tab on the can and took a deep, relieving swig. “Since he already makes you  _feel things--”_

“Hey.” Stanley looked up just long enough to point a warning finger in Ford’s direction and send a half-hearted glare. “Watch your tone, brother.”

“--It might be worthwhile to explore,” Stanford finished.

Lee grunted. “There’s a, uh. A 4th of July festival… thing, up around the lake. Fiddle--  _McGucket_ , like, t-told me to ask you to get us to show up. Or somethin’.” He shifted around in place, trying and failing to hide how just talking about the idea made him nervous. “It’s a fair with games and shit, you know-- a carnival.”

“Perfect,” Stanford said, flapping a palm against his open journal. “Sounds like a date.”

Lee rubbed a shoelace under the pad of his thumb, staring without seeing at his sneakers. His face was turning pink.

Stanford deliberately pushed his voice to go a bit louder and cheerier: “And, hey-- fireworks, junk food, cheesy festival games… It might be fun!”

Lee didn’t look up, but he did swallow and nod a little. Stanford stood. “I'll go call Cheryl, I think she'd love a night out.”

 

. . .

Dude was not kidding. Stanley didn’t think Gravity Falls even  _had_  this many people.

“Fucking hell,” Stanford grumbled, rolling the steering wheel around as he tried to find a place to park.

“I thought you said this place was kind of remote?” Cheryl asked.

“It is, but a shitload of people must live here,” Stanford said. “They sure as hell don’t live near  _us_ , though.”

“Damn,” Stanley said, looking out the backseat window. “We might have to hoof it.”

Stanford cranked the shifter into park, shutting off the engine. “Sorry, babe,” he told Cheryl. “Might be a little extra walking.”

“Stanford, I’ve been on my ass grading papers for two weekends,” his wife said, climbing out of the Caddy. “And then I drove the Volkswagen from Portland. I don’t  _care_  if all we do is walk.”

Stanford wound one of his big arms around his wife’s waist, pulling her close enough to plant a kiss on her hair, nuzzling her with a smile. “Sounds good to me,” he crooned.

“Boo,” Lee commented, making a face at his brother.

“Like I care what  _you_  think,” Stanford challenged.

Stanley snorted, rolling his eyes as he crammed his hands into his pockets. “Let’s go already,” he whined.

After a short line passing through a sawhorse-and-posterboard entrance, Stan had a fresh stack of tickets and stepped into a world of red, white, and blue. Temporary trailers advertised deep-fried delights and bucket-sized event cups of soda, and the mouth of a maze of booths had been set up right after the entry gates.

As they passed through the aisles, Stanley noticed how the  _MGL_  logo was prominently painted or stickered somewhere onto every sign.  
  
“I’m going to get a funnelcake the size of my head,” Cheryl declared. “With a buttload of unhealthy bullshit on top.”

A screech of distorted feedback echoed over a loudspeaker, drowning out Stanford’s reply. The researcher looked around, noticing a shift in the crowd. “Let’s go see what that is.”

A short stage had been erected on the bank of the lake, and held a microphone on a stand in front of a few occupied chairs. Stanley followed his brother and sister-in-law into the small gathering audience, stopping a few feet away from the front.

“Is there some kind of showcase here, too?” Ford asked him.

Stan shrugged, watching the stage. “I know as much as you do, broseph,” he said.

“Well,” Stanford added, pointing a thick finger forward, “here comes your guy.”

Fiddleford McGucket was climbing the short steps leading up to the stage and making his way towards the microphone. He wasn’t wearing a suit this time. Instead, he had on a linen button-up and tasteful slacks; something appropriate for the setting.

Stanley took a moment to punch his twin in the arm, even as his blush betrayed him.

The short engineer gently tapped his human fingertips against the mic, listening to air pop on the filter, before he smiled out at the crowd.

Stan’s gut flipped a little.

“Hi, Gravity Falls,” he began. “And happy Fourth…”

“Ohh, no  _wonder_ ,” Stanford teased lowly into Stanley’s ear. “He sounds  _kyoot_.”

His brother made a kind of strangled sound, and elbowed him hard. “Fuck, Stanford,  _shut up_.”

“What are you doing to him?” Cheryl demanded, turning to look at her husband.

“Lee has a crush on that guy at the microphone,” Stanford explained, deep voice pitched simple and airy. Stanley kept his eyes on the stage though his ears had long gone totally pink.

But Cheryl seemed to want to step in, taking her turn to jab a sharp, thin elbow into her husband’s stomach, receiving a winded “ _Oof_ ” for her effort. “Shh,  _hey_. Don’t be rude,” she chastised. “If I hadn’t’ve had a crush on  _you_ , we wouldn’t be married right now.”

Stan had already hidden his face in one of his palms; his glasses pushed up onto his forehead on his fingers. “Pretty sure he’s already married,” his muffled voice told.

Cheryl made a sympathetic whistle. “Tough break, toots.”

“…So, go on,” McGucket said, voice ringing bright and cheerful over the sound system. “Have fun, y’all. McGucket Labs is both proud and honored to once more put on a summer fair for the town it serves.” He raised a finger, as though in reminder. “And, don’t forget about the fireworks when the sun goes down!”

Applause and cheers from the crowd, another smile from McGucket, and then the man was gone. Stan tried not to make it obvious that he was watching which way Fiddleford left.

“Alright, back to the funnelcake,” Cheryl announced. She snuggled up close to Stanford’s side, giving a doe-eyed expression. “Buy me funnelcake, and I’ll do that  _thing_  you like, later.”

“ _OKAY_ , this is gettin’ weird,” Stanley loudly stated, walking off in the opposite direction.

“Meet us back at the car!” Stanford shouted over his shoulder.

 

. . .

Cheryl had a good eye, he thought, a couple of hours later. He licked powdered sugar from his thumb. That funnelcake was  _delicious_.  
  
He’d already had a couple hotdogs, drank a beer on a paddle boat, and had sat on the tilt-a-whirl with some teenagers for a couple of turns until they all stumbled from the ride and yakked all over the ground behind the portolets.

The blue sky was bruising up as the daylight faded, the darkening fingers of sunset layering pinks and oranges above the trees. It wasn’t even night, and he still had a pile of tickets to spend.

“Try and win,” a bored voice called out. “Throw a ball into a hole and win a thing.”

Stan stared at the bright booth, before sauntering over.

“Gimme a few,” Stanley says to the carnie. He exchanges a wad of tickets for a bucket of old baseballs, and grabs the first one with a muttered “Aaand a-one, and a-two…”

He lobs the ball at one of the larger center holes and misses. Quickly he grabs up another and repeats the throw, missing again. Stan slams a fist down onto the wooden counter, making the bucket jump. “ _Damn it!”_

“Don’t take it so seriously,” the carnie advises in a bored monotone, thumbing through a magazine at the side of the booth.

“I won’t take  _you_  so seriously, you greasy jerk,” Stan snaps with annoyance.

The carnie snorts and turns a page in his magazine.

Stanley takes a moment to pull in a deep breath, exhaling noisily as he grabs a third baseball with one hand, pushing up his glasses with the other. He eyes one of the smaller holes, adjusting his grip on the ball as he lines up sight, and then letting the ball go in a gentle, underhanded swoop.

The ball passes through the gameboard with ease, triggering a line of blue colored bulbs to flash as it recorded the win.

Stan whoops and jumps in place, grinning widely.

“Still need to get  _five_  in the same hole to win somethin’,” the carnie tells.

He’s already gripping another baseball and pulling his arm back. “Watch me win this entire thing, buddy,” Stan announces.

He repeats the motion and gets another ball in, cackling with glee. He feels rushed with excitement, adjusting his glasses and re-rolling the ends of his T-shirt’s sleeves to lie flat across his upper arms. He pulls out the remaining baseballs and sets them in a line beside himself on the board, plunking the empty bucket to the ground behind the booth.

A third ball sails in. A fourth.

Stan is grinning, eyes locked onto his target.  _Just one more._

He reaches out blindly to his right, expecting to grab the last baseball-- but he wraps his hand around someone else’s, instead.

Stanley looks away from the board and into the unnerving, familiar gaze of Fiddleford McGucket.

Like a sucker punch, Stan’s climbing confidence is instantly missing.

Fiddleford looks at him for a moment, before nodding towards the game board. “You’re doin’ well,” he comments. His eyes return to Stanley. “How many you get?”

“Uh.” Stan works his jaw, very aware of how his hand seems locked over Fiddleford’s on the ball. “Four.”

“Well, here,” Fiddleford pulls his smaller hand out from under Stan’s with ease, offering him the remaining baseball.

Stanley takes it without a word, and kind of stands unmoving for a frozen couple of seconds.

"Look, are you gon’a finish?" The carnie pipes up, now irritable. "I need  _all_  the balls back before I'm allowed to take tickets from another player."

Stan shoots him a dangerous glower before he remembers his company. But Fiddleford holds up his hands in an encouraging pose.

"Go on, Stanley," he says. "Win your game."

Stan can't help how he holds on to the baseball for a moment longer, eyes going from Fiddleford, and back to the game, before an anxious clenching behind his ribs has him flinging the ball too hard like when he first began playing.

The ball bounces against the plywood and careens down at an angle, rolling in a hard stutter across the ground.

“Aw, damn it,” Fiddleford states. “That’s a shame.”

Stan’s frowning to himself, feeling like a yutz. He watches the carnie grab the bucket and start to gather the baseballs for a moment, before there’s a hand on his right elbow. Fiddleford smiles up at him, his eyes crinkling. There’s a reflection of the booth’s decorative flashbulbs glinting on his glasses.

The taller man totally forgets about the game.

“Let’s take a walk,” Fiddleford suggests.

“Yeah,” Stan agrees. “Yeah, okay.”

 

. . .

The primary chunk of the carnival is centralized within the wide space cleared around the legitimate entrance to the lakeside, so beyond the bank of considerably-placed plastic restrooms, and the year-round bait store, there’s no one out here by the water. Stan’s game was already set up at what would be the back of the carnival, so when Fiddleford leads him on a walk, it’s not very far to go until they’re effectively alone.

A part of Stanley wants to feel distressed about this turn of events, but… doesn’t.

“Heh, uh, you weren’t kidding,” Stan suddenly tells, keeping step with the shorter man. “This fair thing is a big to-do.”

“Are you having fun, then?” Fiddleford asks, looking up at Stan as they walk.

“Yeah!” Stan assures, a broad smile stretching his face for a moment. “I got sick on the tilt-a-whirl with some kids, it was  _great!”_  His words almost immediately ring back at him inside his head. “Uh, that-- That was a while ago.”

But Fiddleford just blurts out this sharp bark of laughter that defuses the tension trying to climb around Stanley’s shoulders. “I can’t ride those things,” he admits. “I don’t know how some people do. I  _always_  get sick.”

“Well...  _I_  can’t ride the Ferris wheel,” Stan offers.

Fiddleford looks at him again. “Why?”

“Waaay too high.”

“Ah.”

“Can’t stand how it just stops up there in the air like that, either,” he adds, picking over tree roots as he follows the engineer. Fiddleford seems to be leading them along a wooded path curving around the lake. The last bits of violet are fading from the sky, trading out for a roll of dark blue pinpricked with emerging stars. Stan glances around.

“It’s pretty nice out here,” he says.

Fiddleford’s stopped, looking out at the dark water below the bank. They’re already a sizeable distance from the perimeter of the festival. “I need to know something, Stanley,” he starts.

Stan pulls his gaze down from the sky, pushing his glasses up his nose as he watches the other man. “Uhh… alright,” he tries, awkward.

Fiddleford turns towards him, his blue eyes sharp.

He asks: “How much do you like me?”

Stanley tries not to freeze. “…What?”

“Because…” Fiddleford is moving towards him, now; a slow, sure approach that makes Stan mirror the motion in opposite. “… _I_  really like you.”

The admission has the bartender stumbling a bit, but he regains his footing-- just in time to back against a tree. “Uh,  _um--”_

Fiddleford is about four feet in front of him by now, and doesn’t seem to be stopping. “I like you a lot,” the engineer tells, voice smooth. The bark is rough against Stan’s back, but he just stretches closer against it.

If they’d been sitting, the shorter man would be in his  _lap_. “So,” Fiddleford states, his breath hot on Stanley’s chin. “I’ve got to know.”

There’s a deafening  _boom_ , and then the little clearing where Fiddleford had stopped them is lit up with a brief flash of gold light, which fades with the sound of a distant crowd’s applause.

“Uh, uh-oh,” Stan splutters. His hands are unconsciously gripping back at the tree, his heart hammering behind his ribs like a lightweight with a lot to prove. Desperately, he turns his face up at the patch of sky. “Th-The fireworks, we’re uh-- We’re missing--”

“Stanley.”

He looks back at Fiddleford, watching a shine of green light pass across the shorter man’s thin features. He swallows. When there’s a second of quiet, he asks: “Yeah--?”

The engineer’s hands are suddenly cupping at his face and pulling him forward, locking his mouth firmly over Stan’s own.

Stan immediately tensed. He almost forgot to breathe.

Fiddleford… Fiddleford McGucket…

_‘Holy shit, he can kiss.’_

This was nothing like kissing a woman, his brain absently registered. Fiddleford’s lips were firmer, his hands stronger, and there was the feel of a slight scratch of foreign stubble against his cheeks.

Stan tried to stay in the moment, tried to pay attention, but then Fiddleford’s lips were pressing, relaxing; pressing again and again in a massage against Stanley’s mouth that draw absent, pleased noises from the bartender’s throat. One of Fiddleford’s hands moves up to weave into Stan’s hair as another firework lights up the sky; fingernails scratching lightly at his scalp as they plunge forward, sending a frisson of thrill down Stan’s neck.

Fiddleford sucks on the swell of Stan’s upper lip, nipping playfully for a moment at his lower, before pulling back and asking in a husky voice, far too close to Stanley’s mouth: “You like me, don’t you?”

Stan took the moment to pant, gulp a little, blinking a few times as his brain scrambled to work. “I-- I do.” The admission is shy, sounding awkward in his deep voice. “I, I’m…” His hands finally come back from their death-grip against the tree, and he uses one to push up his glasses. “If I didn’t like you, I wouldn’t--”

The engineer presses himself against Stan until they’re flush from chest to groin. The contact snaps little rocking pulses from Stanley’s hips, draining newfound blood from his head, and he makes a guttural, approving sound without thinking.

“--Kiss you,  _shit_ ,” he finishes, cursing as he feels a smaller thigh slip in between his own, pressing forward knowingly.

Stanley stared, gaping a little. He actively tried to ignore the thrum of heat that sped south from his navel, pooling with enthusiasm in his pelvis.

“Since I like you so much,” Fiddleford tells, thumb stroking over one of Stan’s strong cheekbones as he nudges the end of his nose with Stan’s own; his lips brushing against the other man’s as he spoke. “I want you to be with me. Don’t you want t’be mine?”

He delves his other hand expertly over the hem of Stanley’s jeans, carding past the elastic of his briefs and grabbing at the other’s half-hard cock as he kisses Stan again, this time pushing his tongue past the seam of soft lips. The other male gulps, a strangled sound. Fiddleford feels the organ in his hand pulse, rapidly gathering heat.

Fiddleford has his thumb and forefinger circled into a grip at the base and he tugs down just once, just enough within the confines of Stan’s blue jeans to keep his attention, asking: “D’you understand me?”

“I--  _Haah_ …” Stanley’s chin is curled slightly inwards towards his neck, and he sounds half-dazed.  _‘Good.’_  “I’ve never--”

“ _Shh_ ,” Fiddleford hushes, tone comforting as he keeps his hand going, teasing Stan into hard, throbbing erection. “I know, sugar. S’alright.” He drags his lips up Stan’s chin, mouthing at his stubble and licking the flushed swell of his lower lip.

It’s enough to spark life completely into the bartender’s cock and for the both of the man’s broad, beautiful hands to grab Fiddleford’s jaw, and kiss him again.

The taller male’s hips are stuttering minutely, erratic as Fiddleford deliberately doesn’t keep a consistent rhythm; trying to draw Stan’s attentions out fully, make him grab hold of Fiddleford, make him say what the engineer wants.

He breaks the kiss and presses their foreheads together, watching how Stanley’s eyes stayed squeezed shut, a pink bloom spreading across his cheeks as his mouth hung open, panting _. ‘Perfect.’_

“Wha’d’ya say?” Fiddleford whispers, just barely heard over the sound of another firework exploding across the lake. “Don’t you wan’a be with me?”

He’s almost too worked up to think. Thinking took too much effort. There were other things, much  _better_  things that Stan would rather give his effort. But the talented pull on his sex went a twinge too tight as Fiddleford nipped the soft skin under his jaw, and Stan couldn’t stop the yelp that followed.

The shock was short lived, because Fiddleford’s hand was back at its previous, maddening rhythm. “ _Staaanleeey_ …” He drawled, his thumb rubbing a gentle circuit along the cords of the younger man’s throat.

Stan moaned.

An intentional press of a blunt, callused fingertip against the sensitive head at the end of his cock, and Stanley is whining high and loud, chest heaving as the sensation strikes electric, out from his gut.

“Tell me,” Fiddleford demands.

“ _Yes!”_  Stan’s voice is hoarse, weak with arousal. “Yes,  _yes_ ,” he babbles, “I do, I do  _I do--”_

From nowhere, Fiddleford sank to his knees and did quick work of the belt, button, and zipper fastened to Stan’s slim hips. The buckle jingled as it dangled free, Fiddleford pushing apart the fly of the worn jeans.

Stanley is momentarily confused at the absence, but he cottons on quick and tries to make a half-hearted protest, but his words stick into his throat as it constricted, making him gasp.

He makes weak, shallow little noises, finally going silent when Fiddleford shoves his pants and underwear down to his knees.

The brunet’s cock is circumcised, and flushed, and curves up slightly to his middle when it pops free of the elastic of his boxer briefs. Fiddleford can’t help the unconscious swallow he makes as he stares in the low light, saliva puddling under his tongue.

Stanley’s thighs tremble and he shouts, an unabashed yelp of sound when Fiddleford gives no warning before he grazes teeth over the hypersensitive skin of Stan's cock. The bartender’s knees threaten to buckle, leaning heavily against the tree behind him and giving a reflexive hiss when the rough surface of the bark meets the heated skin of his backside.

He whimpers, high and breathy. His hand comes up to cup behind Fiddleford's head while the other white-knuckles at the tree behind himself, unconsciously bracing.

It becomes clear that kissing is definitely  _not_  all that Fiddleford McGucket knew how to do.

Stan’s noises are drowned out by the fireworks.

 

. . .

It’s almost a chore to put his feet in front of the other. He was boneless in the best way; a warmth buoyed up into his middle while his limbs felt heavy and drunk.

Fiddleford’s right hand is laced tightly in Stan’s left, the metal of the prosthesis feeling strangely warm, and an odd kind of human against his palm.

The din of the carnival gets louder as they approach, mostly hidden by the shadows behind the last row of booths.

Suddenly, Stanley remembers how he’d gotten here, and his hand in the other’s grip does an absent, anxious kind of clenching. “Fiddleford, I…”

There’s a hand pulling his face over, and then the engineer is kissing him soundly. The press of lips stays closed, but the promise in them is just as heady as it was in the woods.

“I’ll pick you up from the bar tomorrow,” Fiddleford states. Stan’s brow crinkles.

“Uh…” The hand in his grip gives an affectionate squeeze. There’s a soft bend of a smile at Fiddleford’s mouth. “Okay.”

Fiddleford rubs his human thumb against Stanley’s cheek one more time, before letting go and pulling his hand away. Stanley follows him where he rounds the booth, and barely has time to watch him disappear into the crowd.

“Hey, there you are!”

Stanford and Cheryl are walking towards him, walking away from a crowd exiting the hall of mirrors. “Where’ve you been?” Cheryl asks, adjusting her grip on a pair of large stuffed neon lizards. “Look what Stanford won at darts.” She shot a proud smile up at her husband. “The kids’ll love this.”

“That’s nice, Cher,” Stanley says.

“Hey, you alright?” Cheryl inquires, voice a little concerned.

Stanley’s gaze is stuck on his brother.

Ford seems to read him like a book, and he wraps a consoling arm around his wife’s shoulders.

“He’s fine, hon,” the researcher assures. “Probably overstimulated, huh, bro?”

“Yeah,” Stan agrees. He pulls off his glasses and rubs oil from the inside rests where the frames perch on his nose. As he’s wiping his thumb on the edge of his shirt, he replaces his glasses with a: “Yeah, I’m done.”

“Cool,” Stanford says.

“Let’s blow this popsicle stand,” Cheryl decides.

 

. . .

It’s a while before Stan manages to fall asleep that night.

 

.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Majorly plot-heavy, majorly character-develop-y, maaajorly filthy. 
> 
> Fair warning: This sucker's twice the size of Chapter One.  
> You are the masters of your own fates, guys.
> 
> Enjoy.

Stanley’s shoving his leather jacket into the space by his feet after they’re back in the car. “Hey, that was really good,” he says.

Fiddleford turns the key in the ignition as he smiles at the man. “Did you like it?”

“Yeah! I love all that fancy crap. I, uh.” A nervous laugh. “Heh, I  _never_  get to go to places like that,” Stan mentioned. “Do you go there a lot?”

“I’ve not had a reason until somewhat recently,” Fiddleford admitted. “But, I’m a little fond of it. It’s one of the few places in town where the menu actually matches with the atmosphere.”

He took the convenience of stopping at a red light to send a look over to Stanley, who had been watching the engineer’s profile as he spoke. “Cozy. Satisfyin’.” He couldn’t stop his gaze dropping to the bartender’s mouth. “ _Intimate_.”

Stan’s eyes went wide behind his glasses. Fiddleford watched as the apple of his throat bobbed on a self-conscious swallow.

The older man knew exactly what he was doing to Stan when he pitched his accent low like this, and not even an act of friggin’ Congress could get him to care.

God, but when he was right, Fiddleford was  _right_.

He  _knew_  going after Stanley Pines would be worth it.

He hadn’t had this much fun in ages.

Fiddleford probably hadn’t needed to push it as far as he did, that day at the lake-- But in all honesty, that moment had been more for _his_  personal benefit than it had been about Stanley’s orgasm.

He’d been thinking about putting his mouth on that blushing hunk for over a  _month_  leading up to the festival, and judging by the way he’d noticed Stan wasn’t able to look him in the eyes that last week, Fiddleford had known there was next to nothing on earth which would have been able to stop him.

And, that was the beauty of it, he thought to himself-- He got what he wanted.  _Again_.

_‘Like always.’_

This time, the silver-lining trimmed around an already lovely cloud was there didn’t seem to be any apparent end in sight.

Fiddleford glanced over to where Stanley was seated beside him in the Bentley. The bartender was looking out the window, watching as they sped past buildings. Stan wore an expression on his angular face that made him look as though he was sitting with a secret, internalized kind of glee; like the sun itself was hiding just beyond the thin wall of his idiosyncratic awkwardness.

It could have had something to do with how Fiddleford had made a proprietary reach for his hand as soon as they had gotten into the car, and had been holding it against his thigh for the entire drive.

A light, lazy breed of honeyed smugness settled itself within his chest. Christ, all he had to do was hold the boy’s  _hand_. If the outcome weren’t settling itself so much into his favour, Fiddleford would have sincerely pitied for such an inexperienced past to belong to a body like that.  
  
Let others slander what they wanted to about virgins-- Fiddleford didn’t mind teaching. With a student as overwhelmed by the simplest of attentions, and yet as eager to please as Stanley was, the engineer knew things could only climb higher.

A nice way to start would be for Fiddleford to climb  _him_.

The Bentley pulled into the yard outside the Pines cabin just as dusk was fading into legitimate night. Fiddleford pushed the shifter into park and turned off the engine.

Not a second after, and Fiddleford had his hand back in Stanley’s space as he clicked open the lock on his own seatbelt. “I’m so glad y’came out with me tonight, Stanley,” he said, catching the bartender’s eyes.

His right hand affectionately smoothed over a beautifully muscled, hairy forearm for a second--  _(‘God **damn** , he’s handsome.’_) --and finally settled itself onto Stan’s thigh. The reflexive tensing of the flesh beneath the denim told Fiddleford how having his palm so dangerously close to the younger man’s crotch was making him feel.

Arrogantly, Fiddleford began a broad, massaging sweep over Stanley’s upper leg.

Something about the action seemed to spark a new thought in the brunet, making his brows bend upwards as he blinked. “ _Hey_ \-- uh, um.”

Stan closed his mouth almost as soon as he’d opened it, reflexively teething the inside of his lower lip. The words in his head ran together, tumbling into an anxious, apprehensive mass that refused to reach his tongue.

Fiddleford looked at him, his head tilting minutely. The hand in Stan’s lap continued its unhurried, sure stroking over the meat of his thigh. “What is it, Stanley?”

The bartender swallowed, working the back of his tongue into his throat. He took a breath. “Uh, uhm-- W-Well, I mean,” Stan twiddled his fingertips on his knee. “You know I, I enjoyed-- Heh.” A crack of a smile bent at his mouth. “The thing we did in the woods, y’know. On the Fourth.”

An eyebrow arched itself up a little above Fiddleford’s glasses as the engineer smirked. “I figured,” He said, a satisfied curl pulling in his drawl. Fiddleford pressed the pad of his thumb in a drag going inward and down along the leg seam of Stanley’s jeans, adding: “I enjoyed  _that thing_  we did, too.”

Stanley watches his face with a mild kind of awe, lips parted as he felt the hairs on his limbs stand up in a delicious frisson of Fiddleford’s touch. The affectionate intensity in the smaller man’s expression almost made Stan want to abandon his initial thought, and the confident promise waiting in the hand in his lap wasn’t helping matters, either.

But this was  _important_.

He reaches down and completely covers the slim hand with one of his own, stilling it before he can overthink the decision. “B-But, it’s just, uh…” Stan falters, fighting the climbing worry in his gut, trying to unscramble his anxiety into manageable sentences, and failing. “ _You know_  I’m-- S-so,  _I_  can’t have… I mean, I’ve never-- But  _I_  don’t, I don’t… know if…”

The stretch of silence that hung in the Bentley was the worst sort of oppressive; a stillness that felt like he was sitting under a spotlight.

In a low, tiny voice, Stan asked: “Are you clean, Fiddleford?”

Each second that the engineer doesn’t spend replying is another second that makes Stanley want to punch himself.

“…Stanley Pines.”

He looked up. The expression on the other man’s face was plain, open. Gone was the sly, playful tease, and all that remained was an honest severity.

The hand under his gave Stan’s upper leg a sweet squeeze. “I promise you,” Fiddleford swore, “You’re safe with me. Stanley. I  _promise_ you.”

Like a dam giving way, the rush of relief that floods him is practically euphoric. A shy grin split his cheeks. Stan hoped he wasn’t blushing.

“Really?”

“Really, really.” Fiddleford smiled.

Stanley felt something give a warm bend in his chest at the sight.  _‘Geez, what a smile.’_

“If it’d make you feel better,” the engineer told, “the next time I pick you up, I’ll take you t’look at my records yourself.”

Stanley adjusted his glasses. The fact alone that Fiddleford offered the idea made the coil of dread in his stomach unwind into something looser, lighter. Suddenly, an absent part of him wonders why he was even worried in the first place.

“Uh, no, no; that’s alright,” Stan said. “I’m--” Now he  _knew_  he had a blush. “…I trust you.”

“No, you’re right. It’s important,” Fiddleford countered. He turned his hand over until the warm metal of his palm was flush with the skin of the one above. He wrapped his fingers around Stan’s hand, holding it. “Don’t worry,” he told, voice smoothly confident, “I’ll prove it to you.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Fiddleford echoed, turning slightly in his seat to face the other man. Unconsciously, Stan mirrored the motion. Fiddleford scooched up close to the center console, pulling back his hand to wind it around the side of Stan’s neck, fingers fanned out to cradle the shape of the bartender’s jaw. “In the meantime…” He began, adjusting his pose just enough to slip his other hand back into Stan’s lap. The gasp he both feels and hears as he cups at Stanley’s groin is like music. “…I don’t think you’ll object to my doin’  _this_ , will you?”

The hands that reach up to envelope his slim cheeks and pull him forward into a heady kiss is its own kind of answer.

He always got what he wanted.

 

. . .

Stan knows he must be waving like a lovesick fool as he watches Fiddleford’s Bentley drive out of the yard, but the deep, sluggish pounding of his heart in his chest coupled with the all-over buoyancy of afterglow makes him not care.  
  
Stanford was in the kitchen, his big fingers mindlessly toying with the long, curly cord of the landline as he leaned against the wall; the phone nestled between his ear and one large shoulder.

Stanley stopped in the doorway. Ford looked up and raised his eyebrows in greeting at his brother. “Hey, here he comes now--” He said into the phone. He looked back at Lee. “Cheryl says hi, bro.”

“Hey, Cheryl,” Lee returned, dropping his jacket over a nearby chair. He hadn’t worn it since he’d left the restaurant. “Stanford, is there any soda left?”

“Should be,” Ford replied. His brother moved over to the fridge, and Stanford’s attentions turned back to his phonecall. “Yeah, I think they went out to eat, at least I--”

The researcher jerked his head back around at Stanley, having only glanced at him while he spoke. “Whooaaa,  _Stanleeeey!”_  Ford hoots, looking at his twin with a wide, toothy grin. “Nice  _hickey_  on your neck!”

 _“Whaaaat?!”_  Cheryl’s shriek is tinny, yet loud and clear through the plastic receiver.  _“He’s got a **what**?!”_

Stanford cackles loud at the sound. “A hickey, babe! Our little Lee has a hickey!”

The beet red blush that crawls up his brother’s cheeks has Ford doubling over as he laughs himself an identical shade of red-faced.

“Hey,  _fuck you_ , you guys are assholes,” Stanley snaps, but there’s no real venom to his voice. If anything, there’s a grin.

He turns to look at the front window of the microwave, catching sight of his own soppy expression. There’s a damned  _crooked smile_  at his mouth, for cryin’ out loud. He checks out his neck in the dim reflective plastic, counting two half-dollar-sized splotches of violet-pricked fuchsia on the left side; closer to the cords of his throat than the soft space below his ear.

Yep. Those were hickeys.  _Impressive_  hickeys, god  _damn_.

Stan watched his throat bob as he made a hard swallow, cartilage shifting under the larger bruise’s edge. There’s something like a faint, staggered arch of red ringing the sides-- Fluttery excitement pulses somewhere soft and hot below his navel as his brain supplies: _‘Sweet fuck, he left teethmarks.’_  
  
The delicate fingertip he touches to his florid skin is enough to send blood rushing south again.

_Stanley hadn’t controlled the kiss for very long, because soon after it’d began, Fiddleford’s quick little fingers were punching loose the lock for Stan’s seatbelt and climbing over the center console to burrow into his lap. Stan had only a moment to breathe before he was being soundly kissed again, the smaller man’s tongue flicking over his palate and teeth as he muffled Stan’s moan. How they progressed exactly to Fiddleford undoing his and Stan’s belts was a bit of a blur, but Stan remembers pressing his head back to the seat as he felt Fiddleford’s lips work against his neck and wrap that warm, metal hand around the both of their erections. He hadn’t even noticed Fiddleford’s mouthy sucking; he’d been more preoccupied with tangling his fingers with the engineer’s own and listening to the gasping, muffled whines he could pull out of Fiddleford if he curved his palm a bit tighter against the downstroke on Fiddleford’s foreskin._

Stanford’s loud, smiley heckling clatters against the linoleum and cuts through the memory like a smack. “Oh my god, get a  _room_ , bro.”

Stanley moved away from the microwave with a groan, ignoring his brother as he left the kitchen.

_‘Fucking sandals of Moses.’_

He already had it  _so bad._

Stanley knew he had a tendency to get attached. (Ford had once explained something about “childhood ostracization” and “being failed by caregivers” as coloring his receptions of positive attention.) But, he knew he’d been so sweet on Carla, and he’d crushed hard on Loretta. And, Audrey had been way too unnervingly pretty for Stan’s own good. “Attachment” was just his style.

He climbs the stairs on autopilot, hand trailing on the wallpaper.

Just,  _man_.  
There was  _something_  about Fiddleford.

Everything about the engineer was  _so attractive_  to Stanley, now. He treated the bartender with such individual respect that just thinking about it made Stan’s head swim a little bit. He didn’t point out any of his problems. Fiddleford asked him questions,  _real_  questions. He really listened when Stan spoke. He focused on Stan, and only Stan, when they were alone. The shameless, barefaced  _interest_  that his eyes always set on Stanley still made the bartender’s insides squirm around, but now Stan was starting to welcome the feeling. That skittish agitation only meant Fiddleford was  _paying attention_  to him, and Stan--

Stanley was crazy for that attention.

Kicking off his shoes at his bedside, Stan peeled off his T-shit and toed off his socks.

In a way, he felt like a giant moron, looking back to how he felt before the last couple of weeks. Why had he been so nervous?

Fiddleford made Stanley feel  _normal_. He was so smart, and so  _fucking rich_ \-- and he still wanted Stanley. He still thought Stanley was _special_. This guy could have anyone he wanted,  _any_  man, and he wanted  _Stanley_. 

A feeling like birdsong bubbled with warmth in the space around his lungs.

It was too good. It was  _so_  good.

And it was happening to  _him_.

 

. .::. .

 

A groove developed over the following week or so:

When Stanley wasn’t at the bar, or catching some sleep at the cabin, he was with Fiddleford.

Stan thought it must be great being your own boss, because Fiddleford always seemed to have time for him. Like, without question-- He didn’t just make time, he  _kept time_  for Stanley. Before the bartender would clock in at the Oak, Fiddleford would tell him where they could meet for lunch. And, near the end of his shift, Stan would get a call on the bar’s landline telling whether or not he’d be getting picked up for dinner. (If he wasn’t, then he’d ride over to the MGL main office on the eastside, and meet Fiddleford himself.)

The engineer carried a pager in his pocket that was a small, souped-up prototype from his company’s latest showcase, and when he was drinking at the bar it would usually beep sporadically throughout the hour, signifying that Fiddleford had an appointment, or a call.

But whenever Stanley was with him, the little machine was quiet-- almost eerily so.

When questioned about it, Fiddleford had only smiled, and said: “They  _know_  I’m busy.”

Something about the way he’d spoken told Stan whoever had been hired to field the engineer’s messages had really been picked for their particular discretion (or their  _particular fear_  of McGucket), and not exactly their curriculum vitae.

It was almost surreal for Stanley to be with someone who not only  _wanted_  to have the responsibility of making their decisions, but someone who also seemed to know him well enough to confidently make the choices in the first place. Stan had always had to run after his past girlfriends. Apparently, they’d liked the game of keeping him guessing, so he’d been left with the duties of setting dates, picking times and places, and of shouldering their derision when the places he picked weren’t what they’d wanted.

Another great thing about Fiddleford: The man was clear. Up front. The only jerkin’ around he did with Stan was the fun kind.

 _‘Guess you can’t own a company if you can’t make decisions,’_  Stanley mused.

The bar was somewhat empty for a hot, Friday afternoon. Save for a gnome pounding Johnny Walker like he was being paid for it down at the end, nobody else was seated at the bar. For once, Stan could actually hear the music piped in from the stereo Dan kept beside the grill. (Hair bands and pop princesses-- If Stan had been asked to guess the redheaded behemoth’s musical taste prior to this gig, geez, would he have been  _so. wrong_.)  
  
He was restacking coasters and wiping disinfectant across the bartop, muttering off-key along with some leopard band’s chorus, when the door leading from the back swung open beside him.

Whatever was in Stanley’s gut that always flipped around at the sight of Fiddleford McGucket made its usual pleased, nervous flutter.  
  
The engineer stopped a couple feet away, leaning a hip against the edge of the beer fridge. “Hey.”

Stanley’s mouth broke into a bright smile. “Hey,” he echoed.

Fiddleford gave him a fond grin. “Are you ready?” He glanced up at the neon Hürzch clock hanging above the taps, scratching idly at the skin of his wrist where it ran seamlessly into the metal of his prosthetic hand. “It’s almost seven.”

The bartender blinked, glancing to the clock, too. “Yeeeah, wait--” Stan plopped the spill rag onto the bar where he’d been wiping, and reached behind himself to loosen the knot of his waist apron. “Just let me punch out.”

“Alrighty,” Fiddleford chirped.

He was too busy with the apron to properly react when Fiddleford suddenly stepped closer, pressing his hands around Stanley’s waist as he stared up, into his eyes. Without a word, Fiddleford reached up to Stan’s face, and gently pushed the black frames of the younger man’s glasses further up his nose. Stan hadn’t even noticed they’d slipped.

For a solid second, neither moved.

Then, like a spell breaking, Fiddleford stepped back and headed for the door.

“I’ll be in the car,” he called over his shoulder.

Stan watched as the shorter man slipped out the rear entrance, knowing and not caring about the lurid pink that must match the burning in his cheeks.  _‘Don’t think I’ll ever get over that,’_  he wondered.  
  
Sweet giggling Moses.

He was  _already_  ruined.

Stanley quickly folded his apron into a sloppy square, winding the ties around the fabric as he grinned to himself. He’d just pushed his uniform into the box beneath the bar when there was a pointed grunt at his right.

“Pines.”

Dan was standing at the register, staring at him. Money from the day’s till fanned out like tiny green leaves between his enormous hands.

Stan gave an acknowledging tilt of his head. “Hey, bossman,” he greeted. His timecard was already half-finished, and he was just scratching his initials in pen beside the current date. “I’m almost done with this, dude, don’t worry--”

“I don’t give a fuck what you’re up to with McGucket,” Dan began, apropos of nothing, “but you should be careful.”

Stanley went still. He looked over at the lumberjack, keeping his face carefully blank. “…What’s that supposed to mean?”

If there were any pointed social cues happening in that moment, they went right over the brunet’s head. But, there’s something working behind Dan’s eyes, something that rolls over into an unpleasant, familiar  _something_  which Stanley doesn’t recognize, at first. When he does, he feels his brow knit downwards with sharp, defensive annoyance.

The last time he saw a look like that, it was on his Pop’s face when he’d caught Stanley crying after school.

Stan clenches his back teeth together as he pointedly stares down at his timecard. The pen clatters and rolls in an arc on the knobby woodgrain when he drops it, and he shoves the card back into the rack with a bit more force than was necessary.

“Just keep your wits about you, son,” Dan muttered as he walked past.

Stanley fights the urge to hit something.

 

. . .

Fiddleford had the Bentley quietly idling in the space across from Stan’s bike.

Stanley settled himself into the towncar’s passenger seat with a sigh. Leaving the bar was a relief, but climbing into the cab of his-- _(‘…Boyfriend?’_ ) --was its own, special kind of catharsis.

“Man, I am  _starving_ ,” he announced, pulling the seatbelt across his chest. “Where’re we goin’?”

The Bentley reversed until the rear bumper hung just outside the alley entrance. “I’ve got a place in mind,” Fiddleford hummed, cranking the shift back into drive. “But, first-- I need t’ask you somethin’.”  
  
Stan twiddles with the vents for the air conditioner, giving a one-shouldered shrug. “Uhh, okay?”

He fights a goofy smile when Fiddleford moves his hand from the shifter and places it on its preferred perch atop Stanley’s knee.

“How would you like to come up to the Manor with me?” The older man asks.

Stan scratches at his stubble. “…You mean… go to your house?” He teeths the inside of his cheek as the idea starts to settle. “That’d… Yeah. Uh, that’d be nice. Where is it?”

“It’s the estate on the overlook,” Fiddleford replied.

They’re firmly in the middle of coursing traffic when Stanley’s brain finally drags two-and-two together. “Wait,” he starts. “The…?” He casts an incredulous look over at Fiddleford’s profile, evening the perch of his glasses with the tip of a finger. “That big fuckin’  _fortress_ above the town?  _That’s your house?”_  
  
“One and the same.”  
  
“…Holy shit,” Stan observed intelligently.

There’s the sound of a snorting laugh in Fiddleford’s nose as he agrees. “Yeah.”

The engineer draws attention back to the initial conversation with a pleasant circling of his thumb, tracing the outer shape of the man’s knee. “Stanley…” He says, lowly. “I’d like for you to stay the night.”

The words are formed easy, smoothing over consonants made soft in Fiddleford’s Southern timbre, but they’re understood as a courtesy than anything else. Though mannered, and though patient, everything about the older man is intrinsically authoritative.

The engineer glances over just long enough to catch sight of the second when Stanley’s eyes, staring straight ahead, go wide as his thoughts take proper hold.  _‘Perfect.’_

Stan was aware he was tensing with nervous reflex. But, he wasn’t  _new_. He might be a little scattered, but he wasn’t an  _idiot_.

This was just the natural progression of things, wasn’t it? He’d had relationships before. Memories of Carla, Loretta, and Audrey rose unbidden in his mind-- those awkward, sweaty fumbles in the dark, never  _really_  knowing what the hell he was doing, never really knowing if he was doing something right, never feeling like was actually  _connecting_  (even when his cock was buried to the hilt.)

A belligerent kind of infatuation muscled itself to the fore, drowning out the ghosts of old anxieties as it insisted:  _Already, things are different with Fiddleford. Everything is different with Fiddleford. Nobody’s asked us to stay the night, before. Stop freakin’ out, Stanley._

The bartender still takes a second to speak, gulping down giddiness. “But, I’d need to, uh, I’d need’ta go get some clothes from the cabin first, and, and tell--”

The confident, reassuring squeeze that compresses around the sensitive end of muscle at his knee chokes off the rest of the brunet’s words.

“Then, let’s go.”

 

. . .

Rain had started to fall while they’d been eating, and it kept falling in relentless sheets the entire time they drove up to the Manor.

“Perfect weather for stayin’ in,” Fiddleford remarked.

He drove the Bentley through a pair of wide, wooden entry gates, and took a right onto a smaller gravel drive that circled around the sprawling front lawn towards a lowered entrance. Stanley’s eyebrows rose when he realized it was a garage.

“Whoa,” he breathed. “You built underground parking for your  _house?_ ”

“It’s not just me who uses it,” Fiddleford told, unbuckling after he’d parked.

Stanley levered himself up and out of the Bentley, glancing around at the other vehicles as he slung his bagstrap over his shoulder. A gleaming line of immaculate automobiles stood right across from him. It was like the New Jersey Auto Annual in beautiful miniature. Stanford had the Caddy, his Pop had the Studebaker, but Fiddleford-- Fiddleford had  _them all_. Stan’s fingers tingled with the desperate desire to walk over and  _touch_.

“Are all these yours?” He asked, deep voice pitched a touch venerate.

“A couple of ‘em,” Fiddleford breezily answered, jingling his keyring around his metal index finger as he circled around the Bentley.

Stan’s eyes stayed on the row of shiny, fish-tailed beauties for a second longer, before he felt a small callused hand grip boldly around one of his own.

He looked over, and Fiddleford did that staring thing he sometimes does which always makes Stanley’s belly go hot and fluttery, before pointedly tugging him along. “Come on,” the Fiddleford said, “we’ll take the side-door in.”

A corridor led them through an anteroom and past what looked like a security desk, and finally through a heavy metal door into a gigantic front hall. It wasn’t just giant-- it was fucking opulent. Dark hardwood, black marble floor, chrome and mirror inlayed along the walls, gold trimming the edges of  _everything_ … It was like walking into a spread from  _Modern Style_.

Stan felt his jaw drop a bit, and he reached up his free hand to reperch his glasses as his head tipped back, neck craning to look at it all. He’d once leafed through the glossy pages of a back-issue of  _Vogue_  while sitting in a hotel lobby, and the spreads in that magazine could have been photos of this house’s interior _. ‘Jesus.’_

“This… is no cabin in the woods,” he murmured, gaze going from the statement chandelier hanging above the front doors, to the curving staircase that poured a broad sluice of carpeted steps from the second floor landing.

Fiddleford chuckled. “Nope.”

The hall was quiet, insulated by the dull hammer of rain. The click of Fiddleford’s loafers rang like a shout alongside the scuff of Stanley’s tennis shoes across the polished stone floor.

Stan felt a little like he was moving through a museum; there wasn’t a place he looked which didn’t seem to scream “outrageous expense” at him. Were those actual, goddamned Greek statues by the wall? Was that a  _fountain?_  Stanley had  _known_  Fiddleford was rich, like knowing grass was green, but he must not have  _understood_.

For a horrible, gripping second, inadequacy gnaws at his gut and Stanley feels an overwhelming desire to turn, to  _get the hell out_.

…But Fiddleford’s hand hung so easily within his bigger one.

Stan tries to ground himself in the sensation.

Fiddleford led him up the staircase, keeping right at the landing and up the next set of steps, moving them through what seemed like an overwhelming series of turns and short hallways, until he stopped in front of a plain, nondescript brown door.

The handle was dull from frequent use, and looked to Stan like nothing more than the portal for a broom closet.

But the man dropped his grip on Stanley’s hand and turned the knob to the left, pushing the door inwards. Fiddleford let the door swing open as he announced: “This is my room.”

Stan stops a few feet inside the doorway.

“Holy  _fuck!”_  He squawks, eyes going wide.

Stan takes another step or so into the room before he remembers himself, turning back around to where Fiddleford is now closing the door. “I’m sorry,” he offers. Immediately, his eyes are back to roving over the walls, his feet moving him further forward. “But,  _man_ \-- What a room, dude!”

The older man is pulling off his loafers by the door. “Don’t apologize,” Fiddleford shoots a handsome grin up at Stanley from where he’s crouched. “I appreciate a good swear ev’ry now and again,” the engineer admits.

“Yeah, okay.” Stan walks further inside. “This place is  _ridiculous_ , Fiddleford. Sorry--” He glances back, sees how Fiddleford flaps a nonchalant hand at him, and continues: “--But yeah, this place… Wow. Now,  _this_  is a bedroom.”

“You’re easily impressed.”

“Well,  _maaaybe_.”

Fiddleford’s bedroom was low-ceilinged, yet wide, and was tastefully split between hardwood and carpeting. The carpet obviously partitioned off the side with Fiddleford’s bed (a large, plush four-poster) and a doorless closet entrance, while the hardwood half looked more like a workshop than part of a bedroom.

This room was… comfortable. It didn’t look like it belonged with the parts of the Manor that Stanley had seen. There wasn’t any of that shiny, decorative tchotchke or weirdly-shaped furniture he passed on the way up. While the room was tidy, the carpet and rugs were far from pristine, and the wood flooring bore scratches, discolored drag marks-- even a few scorched areas.

The main hall, the corridors leading here; those spaces were meant to be looked at, not inhabited. This was a room someone actually _lived in_.

Stanley gradually relaxed.

His feet take him over the edge of the carpet. “You, uhh… You bring your work home with you, I take it?” Stan asks. A bookcase stood beside what must be the entrance to the bathroom, and its five tall shelves overflowed with a haphazard assortment of manuals and machinery the bartender couldn’t even try to identify.

“Those are personal projects,” Fiddleford explains. He’s leaning against a bare space of wall, watching Stanley move. “Some are prototypes; I like to tinker with concepts in the privacy of my home before takin’ anythin’ into work to show the team.”

“Huh.” Stan nods. “That’s smart.” Without thinking about it, he sets down his pack by a table and sheds his leather jacket, draping it over the edge, before the fireplace catches his attention. “This is  _great_ ,” Stanley emphasizes, pointing at the unlit hearth. “My place at the cabin… It’s an attic room,” he tells, “and there’s an old furnace, like,  _literally_  across from my bed, stickin’ out’a the wall.”

“Sounds convenient.”

“If anything, it should really help come wintertime.” Stanley’s eyes are moving over details of the raised center of the ceiling as he toes off his shoes, wobbling from foot-to-foot until he’s unconsciously shuffling the toes of his socks against the worn veneer of the hardwood. “But, right now, it’s just a fuckin’ eyesore,” he finishes, pushing up his glasses. He goes back to the bookcase. “This is too cool,” Stan states quietly, fingers moving over the third shelf; the entire space was packed with records and tapes, perfectly alphabetized and dusted.

Fiddleford watches Stanley poke about, wandering from surface to surface like a nosy, content child.

 _‘Jesus,’_  He thinks.  _‘Does he even realize…?’_

Something about the suspicion makes Fiddleford suddenly find Stan  _insanely endearing_.

“Stanley,” He says, noting how the younger man slows at the sound of his voice. “There’s somethin’ I want’chu to see on that desk, there.”

The bartender moves without question, obedience and curiosity both pulling him away from the albums to the long, L-shaped desk opposite the fireplace.

In the midst of a functioning madness of metal parts, notebooks, scattered pencils and curls of wire, there’s a section of desktop that’s completely cleared, save for a single sheet of crisp manila paper. It’s not printed with much, but what it has is typed in neat black-and-white text, and shows a row of short columns near the middle.

Stanley picks it up, murmuring aloud as he reads.

“Central Oregon Social Hygiene Clinic… Fiddleford H. McGucket--”

Breath catches in his throat the same moment that arms wrap around his waist from behind.

He felt a soft huff of air hit the hair at his nape as Fiddleford murmured: “I tol’ju. I  _said_  you’d be safe with me.”

Stan’s eyes are stuck on the printed column of NEGATIVE results running down the right side of the paper.

“I could’ve gone to the hospital in town,” Fiddleford admits, tenderly moving the side of his nose across the T-shirt stretched over the firm skin in between Stan’s broad shoulders. He can feel the taller man’s heart beating fast; Fiddleford splays his hands against Stan’s taut middle, and relishes the feel of muscles tensing on inward breaths against his palms. “But,  _weeell_ …” Fiddleford drawled. “My comp’ny is a primary benefactor for Gravity Falls Medical. I didn’t want’chu to think I’d bribed a lab for fake results.”

Stan sets the report back down, his hand slightly shaking. “Fiddleford…”

“I promised,” the engineer murmured, voice matter-of-fact. “Wanted all to be on the up-and-up for you.”

Without warning, Stanley turned and had his palms around Fiddleford’s jaw and dragged the shorter man close into a hard kiss. Fiddleford responded with enthusiasm, fisting his hands in Stan’s T-shirt as he gains control, licking behind the other’s teeth before pulling his tongue back and nipping sharply on the brunet’s lower lip to make him gasp, before sealing their mouths together again.

When Fiddleford pulls back, sucking in deep lungfuls of air, Stanley’s hands are in his hair, cradling the back of his head, and Stan’s lips are red and swollen. His glasses had slipped a bit crookedly down his nose.

“Kissed stupid” was a good look for him, Fiddleford decides.

Stanley seems to regain his sense as he regains his breath. Fiddleford eyes the pink tip of tongue that swipes out to lick the bartender’s lips. “Fiddleford, I…”

“D’ya want a drink?” Fiddleford asks suddenly. His hands are still on Stan’s chest, and he trails them down along his sides, skimming fingertips upwards over warm skin once he reaches the hem of Stanley’s shirt. Judging by the growing hardness he feels against his middle, and the sensitive twitches of Stan’s skin as Fiddleford smooths his fingers flat, his thumbs making firm circles against the defined outlines of muscle, Fiddleford is sure he can guess the other’s answer.

But hearing it is still a special kind of sweetness. “N-no,” Stanley stutters. “No, no I want…” His voice tapers off, losing strength as his own mind gets in the way.

“Whatever you want,” Fiddleford croons. “This is up to  _you_ , sugar. I won’t get angry if’n y’wan’a stop. Or not even start.”

A new bloom of color darkens the light pink that still lingered along the tops of Stanley’s cheeks from the kiss. Stan adjusts his glasses for a second, immediately returning his hand to the side of Fiddleford’s head.

The action makes the engineer smile; a brilliant, handsome display of lips and teeth he knows goes straight to the younger man’s cock.

 “I don’t… I don’t know what, what to do with--” Stan licks his lips. “--a  _man_.”

Fiddleford’s breath is hot on his mouth, his hands cool on his back. 

He says: “I do.”

 

. . .

Fiddleford had him undressed and sitting on the side of his bed, watching with an enchanted kind of anticipation as the engineer shucked his pants. It didn’t last long, because soon Stanley was being pushed back, scooching further up the mattress as Fiddleford crawled over him.

The lights had been turned down when Stan had still been struggling out of his jeans, but the bedside lamp provided enough illumination for Stan to rake eager eyes over every inch of Fiddleford’s petit frame.

He tried to breathe, but the sight of all that pale, freckly skin had his heart beating too fast. “Wha, what should--”

Hands were at his cheeks, and his glasses were pulled off. Stanley leans up on his elbows and watches the fuzzed outline of Fiddleford’s slim shape move for a moment, hearing the tell-tale  _click_  of glasses set on the nightstand, before Fiddleford is above him again. He’d removed his glasses, too, and the bright, intelligent gaze Stanley finds is like seeing the engineer for the first time; there are flecks of palish green in his irises Stan hadn’t noticed before. The lack of corrective lenses sharpens every feature of Fiddleford’s face in this proximity. Smooth, pinpricked moles dot the sweep of his neck, his shoulders.

Stan licked his lips. “What should I do?”

“Just kiss me for right now,” Fiddleford instructed lowly, his breath hot on Stan’s mouth.

He settles between Stanley’s legs and slants his lips over the other’s, swallowing the hitched breath Stan makes when Fiddleford’s cock brushes against his own. Fiddleford can feel how his heart is racing, and uses the rush of Stanley’s excitement to suddenly roll his hips forward, grinding a sweet rhythm that has Stan hissing into the kiss and swearing, twitching his thighs to rock up and keep them flush.

Fiddleford smoothed his palms in a tease over Stanley’s skin, glancing his fingers along sides and scraping blunt nails up the defined cut of the brunet’s hips. It’s not long before Stan’s breathing harder, and starts to tense in places-- muscles in his legs and arms tightening and relaxing as pleasure starts to build and spread from his lower belly, sending minute shivers stuttering over his skin, over a crawling blush that has everything to do with the hard, beading erection Fiddleford’s mercilessly grinding against.

He slows, gasping against Stanley’s neck as the contact teases his own hardness, eventually stopping altogether. “Hold on,” he whispers, savouring the slack, open-mouthed panting Stan’s doing near his cheek.

Fiddleford makes to move off, but Stanley’s large hands immediately come up to hold his back. “Ain’t goin’ far,” Fiddleford murmurs, mouthing at Stan’s jaw. “I need to get somethin’ ‘fore we go further.”

“What?” Stanley turns his head, catching a damp drag of lips over his own for a second, before Fiddleford pulls back to look at him, smirking.

“You are  _not_  fuckin’ me dry,” He states; a playful, commanding lilt in the crude words, and a self-conscious blush hits Stanley’s cheeks-- like he wasn’t  _already_  grinding his naked erection against another person.

There’s a chuckle, a hand sliding over his hair, and the warm weight of the smaller man is gone; the bed shifting as he climbs off.

Stanley closed his eyes, listening to his lungs pulling in air, blood beating in his ears. Without thinking, he raised a hand to fist a loose ring of his thumb and forefinger around the base of his cock, tugging just enough to feel the pull of need twitch in the stiff flesh.

“Oh, don’t start that,” He hears Fiddleford say, and soon feels, as one of the engineer’s hands joins his and gives an active, confident stroke that has Stan’s shoulders pressing back and his neck stretching with a groan. “As much as I love to watch,” his lover drawls, “I’ve got somethin’ better in mind.”

The hand leaves his sex and pulls for Stanley to sit up. Fiddleford climbs into his lap, knees and shins going to bracket Stanley’s thighs. He takes one of Stan’s hands before the brunet can settle it onto Fiddleford’s leg, shifting a small bottle into Stanley’s palm.

Myopically, Stan brings the label up to his eyes.

 _‘Oh.’_  He knows  _exactly_  what this is.

Fiddleford reaches down and idly fists at the both of them. “I need you to stretch me,” he tells.

Stan swallows. “Um, okay--”

“Flip the cap,” Fiddleford instructs, dropping Stan’s cock in favour of running greedy, proprietary fingers along the definition of firm, hairy muscle, combing through the dark hair that spills across Stan’s chest and down to his navel. “Coat your fingers..."

Stan does as he’s told, feeling the cool, oily lube spread down his fingers and pool a bit in the grooves between his knuckles.

Fiddleford leans forward and has his lips on the shell of Stan’s ear. “Now reach around,” he murmurs, “and put your fingers inside me.”

The words are like a direct, pulsing line to his cock. “ _Fuck.”_

“That’s the plan, sweetheart,” Fiddleford says, his grin clear as a bell.

One of Stanley’s hands goes around to cup Fiddleford’s hip, a supporting gesture, and the other dips fingertips in between his cheeks. Stan can feel the furled pucker of Fiddleford’s hole against the pad of his middle finger, and he brushes over it briefly, absolutely delighted to hear how his lover’s voice comes out lower, how his hips cant back a bit wider.

“ _Stanley_ …” Fiddleford sighs, forehead pressed to the younger man’s. “Fuckin’ hurry up,” he orders lightly.

Something about the words makes Stan huff a laugh, the exhale venting excess adrenaline. “God damn.”

But he obliges, pushing the slick digit past the soft ring of muscle.

The engineer’s whole body reflexively tensed with a quavering inhale.

Stanley froze, eyes going wide. “A-are you okay?” He asked quickly, not daring to move, even as he felt lube drip down from his hand.

Fiddleford willed himself to loosen, breathing shallowly as he tucked his chin close to his neck. His hands were firm on Stanley’s upper arms as he steadied himself. “G-gi’me a minute--” He managed, tentatively pressing down a fraction of an inch. “It’s been a-- a while.”

He did this a few more times, pulling up and pressing back down until he could feel the finger slipping in and out easily enough. “Another,” he ordered, “a-add another.”

Stan worried his bottom lip. “You sure…?”

“ _Stanley Pines,”_ Fiddleford snapped,  _“do as I say.”_

 _‘Holy shit,_ ’ the bartender thinks. The rough, commanding annoyance in the other’s voice probably shouldn’t have been as hot as he thought it was. Stan puts his first two fingers together as thin as he can make them, and repeats the slow plunging curl from before.

Absently, he knew he’d expected Stanley’s finger to feel big--  _obviously_ , judging by the size of the rest of him --but the smaller man wasn’t prepared for the significant amount of  _stretching_  he felt as the one finger became two, scissoring his hole wide. (Stanley was a _very_  fast learner, it seemed.)

Fiddleford moaned, a drawn out vibration of sound that distracted for a couple of seconds from the feeling between his legs.

“Hold, hold on--” Stan mutters, pulling away his supporting hand to grab at the bottle of lubricant beside him, bringing it around close to his wet fingers and squirting more before clumsily closing the lid; dropping it to the bedspread.

“Ohhh,  _shit_ , you’re a quick study,” Fiddleford pants, his legs trembling as they instantly tighten to bear his posed weight above Stan’s lap, only relaxing when he feels the warm, cradling spread of Stanley’s dry hand returned to his backside.

Fiddleford was murmuring little words of praise as Stan instinctively crooked three fingers together in the man’s ass-- breathy, aching phrases of encouragement which stuttered as he rolled his hips down onto the bartender’s knuckles, and Stanley was suddenly possessed with the need to  _impress_  this man.

He wanted to be good. He wanted to be praised, to be acceptable, he wanted to make the other male glad he’d ever wanted to touch Stan’s body in the first place.

“Stan…  _Stanley_ \--” Fiddleford breathed, reaching one of his hands back to grasp at Stan’s thick wrist in a guide for his fingers, “--Turn, turn your-- OHH _yess, right there.”_

Stan felt his chest get tight at the sound, excitement thrumming through him as he made that experimental curve again with his hand. There was a firmness against the pads of his fingertips that Stanley kept finding on the upwards plunge. “Is that…?”

“ _Prostate_ ,” Fiddleford gasped. His hips jerked of their own accord and his hole reflexively spasmed, trying to pull Stanley’s fingers further inward.

 _‘So **that’s**  what all the fuss is about,’_ Stan thinks, curiously pressing on the same spot and watching gleefully as Fiddleford’s mouth goes adorably slack.

He remembers hearing things; crude, filthy things sometimes spoken about in hushed, suggestive tones in the locker-room of the gym back in Trenton, but his bashful, awkward shyness had always ruined every chance he’d had to ask for clarity.

Though, the way he has this man riding his fingers kind’a illuminates some of that old confusion.

Stan leaned forward, gently dragging his lips in a line up the engineer’s neck, to the smooth curve of his jaw, huffing as he set a steady rhythm with the plunging spread of his fingers. “Do you like that?” He murmured. His other hand kept its supportive clench around his lover’s backside, gripping a surprisingly plush handful of ass Stanley wasn’t expecting Fiddleford to have.

Fiddleford’s head dropped back as he brought his hands up to grip at Stan’s shoulders, knees spreading his slim thighs wider to keep the angle, and he suddenly lets out this loud, throaty  _moan_  that has Stan’s hips stuttering forward into empty air, a choked groan of his own rumbling against Fiddleford’s throat.

Another firm prodding at that gland in his core wrenched a gasping, shaking wail from Fiddleford’s throat. “Yes _yes_ oh-- oh  _god_ …” The sound has Stan mindlessly sucking a hard kiss to the tender skin below Fiddleford's ear.

“Stan, Stan,  _Stanley_ \-- Stop,  _stoppit_ ,” The engineer stutters, throat clicking with a dry swallow. “Pull’em out, pull--  _Now, damn it.”_

A cold snap of worry tenses in his middle, instantly killing the mindless pink glow that’d been clouding his head. Terrified he was actually hurting Fiddleford, the brunet quickly removes his fingers, lube pooling into the folds of his hand, and he starts to babble: “I’m sorry, I-I thought, I thought I was--”

“Lie back,” The smaller man orders, and as Stan stretches out to his elbows, Fiddleford shifts his knees back as he reaches for the lube. The apprehensive expression on Stanley’s face makes his eyes soften. He rubs a palm over the skin below his lover’s navel, knowing Stanley’s nearsightedness means he can’t fully see the detail of his face; the gesture soothing, apologetic. 

“You did  _fine_ ,” Fiddleford praises. He pulls a loose, wet fist along the length of Stan’s cock; biting his lip at the guttural, groaning swear it brings from the bartender’s chest. “But, I wasn’t about’a lose it ‘fore the main event.”

“The main…?  _Oh_ ,” Stan breathes. He bends up a bit more, using core strength to help him keep the pose, leaning just close enough to watch as Fiddleford straddles above him, chest hollowing as his sex is grabbed and angled, and the man impales himself on the head of Stan’s cock.

The feel of that-- burning, massive,  _magnificent_  --stretch pressing just past the mouth of his entrance wrings a yelp from Fiddleford’s lips, all the air leaving his lungs in a choked compression. Stan had done an excellent job of stretching him, but the boy was hung like nothing else--  _(‘Another thing I was right about.’)_  --and thicker than he’d guessed, and the dull burn of trying to stay relaxed and adjust to the size makes him gasp.

“Oh,  _Stanley_.”

The words are pure friggin’  _music_  and they make Stan sit up completely, arms going around Fiddleford as he sinks in further. The engineer shudders, forcing himself down to the base of Stanley’s cock as his arms wrap around his neck.

“You have no idea how much I’ve wanted this,” he growled into Stanley’s ear.

The pain of being breached, the slightly uncomfortable, inward roll of his rim--  _(‘Good god, it’s been too long.’)_ \--only makes him crave more, so he pulls up an inch before dropping back down; the stinging burn is fucking  _exquisite_ , more than enough to make his hips roll with aborted jerks, already too eager to fall into line.

An echoing, uninhibited groan drawls out of Stanley’s dropped open mouth as his hips rock, back and forth, controlled little snaps that betray his mounting impatience. He reaches up and slants his lips over Fiddleford’s own, a chaste press that makes his eyes flutter closed. But at the open consent, Fiddleford surges forward, gnawing at Stanley’s upper lip, tongue flicking up every few seconds.

 _‘Teeth,’_  Stan thinks, though not without arousal,  _‘always with the teeth.’_

Fiddleford tries to keep the kiss going and also set a rhythm, but only manages a line of shallow, short thrusts. Damn, Stanley was  _big_. He attempts to pick himself up and bring his hips back down, but it’s difficult, and doesn’t do enough-- Christ, he was out of practice. He needed to  _hit_  that bundle of nerves, damn it; not glance past it.

“Stanley Pines,” he huffs, pulling back as he rocks his hips forward, “if y’don’t grab me and _fuck me right goddamn now_ , I’mon’a lose my mind.”

He finishes the statement with a deliberate squeeze around Stan’s cock, earning a strangled moan and a quick heed of his demand; those strong, broad arms moving hands from his hips. They admire the slender taper of his waist for a moment before clenching a grip that helps Stanley pull him up, before slamming Fiddleford back down to the root. The suddenness snaps a high-pitched shout from Fiddleford’s throat, and at the sound, Stan echoes with a gravelly rumble of his own.

The pace of the fuck is set from there-- Stanley barely pulling out halfway before thrusting back in, little noises continuously leaving his mouth as Fiddleford meets him with a cinch on the downstroke.

“I  _knew_  you would be perfect,” he praised, nipping affectionately at Stanley’s shoulder even as he gave a full-body shiver, and unconsciously spread his hips wider. “Y-You love this, don’t you?”

Stanley’s almost too far gone to properly answer, making these rough grunts that seem to be hardwired directly to Fiddleford’s cock, and the engineer cannot help but quicken his rhythm and fasten his lips over the slope of Stan’s neck, feeling delirious as he sucks at the meat of a shoulder.

Fiddleford drops a hand and palms at himself; the tandem sensations making him melt against Stan, tugging a fast upwards clench in time with how he rode his lover’s thrusts.

Tremors radiate through Stan’s limbs and torso from the incredible epicenter of his hips; he can feel that turning, winding tightness already start to build in his groin, delicious, so,  _so fucking close_.

“Please,” Stanley begged, shaking, his doe-brown eyes screwed shut; clearly overwhelmed and loving every second of it. Fiddleford’s gut pulsed wonderfully as he felt Stan’s thrust get more sporadic, his fingers gripping so hard at Fiddleford’s hips that he knew he’d have bruises. The thought makes him squeeze on Stanley’s cock and relish the shout that follows. “Please,  _please_ , _fuck_ \--” His hoarse voice is strained. “ _Haah_ , hah, fuck,  _Fiddleford-- sogood--”_

“ _Staaan_.” He shuts his eyes, and that terrible, beautiful pressure is suddenly gone in the same instant that the head of Stanley’s cock rams against Fiddleford’s nerves, every muscle in the smaller man’s body constricting with perfect, taught immobility. His mind goes an oblivious blank as he comes, white pulsing over his fingers and streaking up between them.

He’s not sure if he screams, not sure if he was able to make any sounds at all.

Fiddleford is panting, going boneless, and already feels utterly sore as the last pulse rips through him. Stanley thrusts a few times more, arms locking around Fiddleford as he tenses with a guttural cry of the engineer’s name.

The weakness of orgasm makes him fall backwards, sending Fiddleford sprawling over him. When the younger man comes around-- enough to register his surroundings --Fiddleford has already pulled Stanley from his body; the bartender feeling a milky blend of lube and come dripping sluggishly from the head of his sex.

It’s another short while before either of them speak, taking time to breathe. Fiddleford’s head is on his chest, and Stan finds his fingers carding through the soft, dirty blond mop of hair at his crown.

“That was…” He blinks up at the ceiling. The hazy, sated exhaustion humming under his skin is  _perfect_.

“I know,” comes Fiddleford’s purring reply. He moves to lie at Stanley’s side, pillowing his head on a solid bicep. The motion makes Stan look over. Fiddleford is flushed-- pink splotches of exertion sticking out on his cheeks, neck, and chest like thrown paint against his pale skin. There’s even some hair damply matted at his temples. The sight is simultaneously adorable, and attractively obscene.

Stanley suddenly wants nothing more than to roll on top of him and kiss the smaller man everywhere.

Instead, he licks his lips, and asks: “…Can we do that again?”

A beat of silence, and then the laugh that explodes from the engineer’s chest is  _remarkable_ , absolutely braying and ugly in its purity, and strong enough to have Stan cracking up like an idiot, too.

 

. . .

“Again” had become twice, and then tripled when Fiddleford had complained about needing a shower. (Which, by the way, was the  _only_ area that actually matched the rest of the Manor. Whatever extravagance that’d been forbidden from the bedroom proper balanced the difference in the indulgent arrangement of the bathroom. The damn place  _sprawled_. Stanley suspected he'd be able to swim in the tub.)

Drying off had been a study in coordination breakdown-- after that last encore against the tiled wall (he had taken the  _genius_  initiative to hold Fidds up the entire time), there wasn’t a major muscle group in Stan’s body that didn’t totally fucking ache. Thankfully, the engineer echoed the sentiment, and he tugged Stanley down to bed with a sheet pulled up and a leg thrown over Stan’s knees.

The bartender fell asleep with a hand resting on the smaller man’s warm, downy thigh.

But it didn’t last long.

Stan woke with an emptiness in his stomach. He blinked a little, glancing over at the clock he remembered sat on the bedside-- if it was right (and he guessed it was), then it was a little after 3AM.

He maneuvered himself up into a sit, groaning at the slight exertion. Still sore, he registered. His upper back burned a little, too-- Reaching a gentle hand over his shoulder, Stan felt the tell-tale ridges of thin, scabbed scratches.

_‘…I made him scratch me.’_

The realization had him bashfully tucking his chin on a dopey grin.

There was a lazy shifting beside him, and then Fiddleford’s squinty, tired face emerged from where it’d been stuffed between a pillow’s edge and the plush surface of the mattress.

“Y’alright?” The words ran together in his jaw, his accent thickening with the weight of sleep.

Stan turned, pet a broad palm across Fidd’s hair. “Yeah, just hungry,” he said. He kept his voice low, an instinctive honoring of the hushed atmosphere that hung over the bed. “How can I find the kitchen? And--” His mind groped for an idea. “You got a robe, or somethin’?”

“End’a the hall, stairs down to the left, a pair’a rights and then through the swingin’ door, robe in the closet.” Fiddleford rattled off the directions like reciting from a well-known script, angling up to an elbow as he stretched out a too-short arm towards the duvet piled at his feet. Stanley reached over and pulled the blanket higher, letting go when Fidd grabbed it and burrowed beneath with a pleased murmur, rolling his face into Stan’s pillow; his eyes already going shut.  
  
Stanley can’t help the kiss he leans over and presses to the man’s exposed temple. “Be right back.”

“Mmm.”

There’s a dark green plaid housecoat hanging just behind the closet entrance, soft and well-worn and reeking of Fiddleford’s subtle cologne. Stan pulls on his jeans and shrugs into the garment, surreptitiously fisting both front edges of the robe as he brings it up to his nose, inhaling deeply. He drops his hands and grabs his glasses from the nightstand, breathing out a lingering scent of the smell he now recognized from the soft warmth of his lover’s neck.

It’d been a while since he’d felt this  _content_.

He slips out of the bedroom with a courteous, noiseless ease of the door into the jamb, and then wanders off down the right hallway.

He knows he makes it down the correct stairs, but he’s eventually facing the second of two corridor intersections when he realizes he’s probably gotten himself lost.

 _‘Yeesh, why the fuck would anyone need a house this twisty?’_  Stan wonders, glancing without really seeing his surroundings. There weren’t any overhead lights on, not at this time of night, but accent lamps burned cones of soft yellow light at the end of every hallway bend, so Stanley wasn’t wandering around in the dark like a total yutz.

It’s only by the grace of sheer dumb luck that he finds the big, silver swinging door Fiddleford had mentioned. The bartender pushed through it with a relieved sigh, fidgeting his glasses up his nose as he scanned the kitchen. Muted, reddish lights shone above a bank of sink basins off to the left, and tiny LCD versions of the bulbs cast shadows from outlets plugged with nightlights in corners near the floor.

The place was big, but it was still a kitchen. Rich or not, food always remained straightforward enough. Right in front of him was an island counter, lines of cabinetry, and--  _a huge refrigerator._

_‘Jackpot.’_

Stan’s feet slapped on the tiled floor as he hauled open both doors of the fridge. Cold air spilled out onto his toes and chilled the skin of his chest, and he hissed a curse under his breath even as he bent closer to the shelves inside. He muttered to himself as he searched: "Deli meat, deli meat, c'mon… geez, guy’s got’a have turkey, or something--”

“So you’re the new one, huh?”

The voice startles him to jump. The doorhandle jerks in his grip, and glass things standing inside the door clink around together for one loud second as he looks over.

There’s a woman standing beyond the counter, looking at him. She reaches over across one of the sink spaces to flick a lightswitch, flooding the area with white light from a long, fluorescent fixture hanging above.

Stanley stares. She’s blonde, and just as half-dressed as he is, except she seems to have remembered to put on slippers.

He licks his lips. “…Uhh-- What? The new what?”

She’s watching Stanley like she’s evaluating him. “ _Fiddleford_  invited you here, didn’t he?” She presses.

The pointed question makes Stanley frown a little. He’s still standing in the open fridge. “Who are you, again?”

A flat sliver of a smile splits the woman's moonshaped face, and doesn’t reach her eyes. “I’m Victoria.  _Missus_  McGucket. I married Fiddleford.”

The hammer of panicked, wild embarrassment that instantly descends onto him is like a safe falling in a cartoon, and the most his brain can manage is a quiet, overwhelmed _: ‘Oy, vey.’_

It must show on his face-- eyes wide, skin paling, expression of gripping, blindsided  _horror_  --because Mrs McGucket’s smile does reach her eyes, now. “Don’t have a stroke, kid, I’m not here to pull a knife on you,” Victoria soothed, though her voice was amused. Smug, even. "It's not like we wear rings, or somethin'."  
  
Stanley is far from convinced. “You,” He falters, swallowing to clear his mouth even as words refuse to meet his tongue. “You… Um.”

And right then, he is very, very acutely aware of how he must look: Unshaven, shirtless, wearing a robe that’s two sizes too small on him, and-- Memory brings a lurid, heated flush to his face.

“I’m no fool to my husband’s…” She eyes Stanley for a moment, her gaze flickering over him in a desensitized, bored sort of way. “ _Habits_.”

He  _knew_  he was covered in hickeys. Fidds was mouthy, orally-fixated, he’d seemed to stay sucking at Stan’s neck when they were-- He closes his eyes with a cold, petrifying acknowledgment of dread.

_‘God be a hole in the floor right goddamned now.’_

Stan’s too preoccupied with his gripping self-consciousness to notice as Victoria walks over, and peers into the fridge, too. “Christ, dude,” she mutters, reaching past Stanley to grab at something wrapped in cellophane. “You need to relax.” She’s unwrapping the plastic to reveal the side of a sandwich, and promptly takes a bite out of it while standing beside him. “You’re far too nervy to be one of Fiddle’s boys,” she observes, cheek full of food.

Slowly, Stan pushes down the desperation to turn away and hide forever. He takes even, measured breaths, trying to ground himself-- but then his mind leaps out to cling urgently to the end of the woman’s words.

They ring back at him inside his head, and the world suddenly feels frozen in a loaded, heavy kind of way.

“…‘Fiddle's boys’?” He parrots, almost without thinking. The question leaves his mouth in a sensation like exhaling really shitty cigarette smoke. It's hot, stinging, it leaves a taste around his teeth that won’t go away.

“’Case you haven’t noticed,” Victoria tells, pulling her sandwich open further, “Fiddleford isn’t exactly the type to be into all  _this_.” She makes a gun-shape with her free hand and gestures the fingers in a bouncing point at her figure, her curves just barely hidden by what had to be the world’s sheerest nightie. When Stan doesn’t respond, when he doesn’t even flinch at her lewd hip wiggle, Victoria’s chewing slows, and she’s back to watching him like she had been before.

“…You didn’t think you were the  _first_  to be brought up here, did you?” She asks.

Stan’s eyes remain fixed on the inside of the fridge. The skin of his feet and his midriff were going prickly from being exposed to the chill for so long, but he did nothing to move. A part of him wondered if he even could.

He feels completely, and utterly  _stupid_.

It’s another moment of silence, an elephantine stretch of discomfort for Stanley, before Victoria wanders back the way she’d come, flicking the lightswitch off as she tells: “The big cabinet on the right has bread, if you’re after a sandwich, too.”

A distant door opens and closes, and then he’s alone once more in the kitchen.

Stanley doesn’t know how long he stands there after Mrs McGucket has left, but he closes the fridge with cold, numbed fingers. He doesn't feel like eating, no matter the sounds from his stomach.

Stan does a better job of relocating Fiddleford’s bedroom on the journey back, and as he’s undressing, letting the housecoat pool on the floor with his jeans; he decides to believe that the new, tiny gnawing he feels in the deep pit of his gut is just from hunger, and nothing else.

 

. .::. .

 

“Fiddles, baby,” Stan wheedled, voice flat, “come on.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What, ‘Fiddles’? Or ‘baby’?”

“ _Both_ ,” the engineer seethed.

Stanley noticed Fiddleford’s shoulders tense, and his jaw stiffen. “Okay, _o-kaaaay_ …” Stan soothed, scooching up onto his side as he rubbed a broad, warm hand over the smaller man’s back. He leaned his chest against Fiddleford, dragging his lips over the apex of a clothed, bony shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

Fiddleford wriggled luxuriously under the touch, momentarily mollified.

It was the fifth or the sixth time that Stanley had slept overnight at the Manor. August was kicking everyone’s ass with one last attempt at a heatwave during the day, while the nights were starting to crisp up a bit by the time the moon had completely swung high into the sky.

The last time he was invited here, they didn’t even go out-- Fiddleford had tinkered with something that stank of motor oil and whirred loudly sometimes, if he didn’t smack it with a hammer, and Stan had plundered through his records across the workspace; keeping easy, light conversation going about the merits of Motown versus British Invasion Pop. Fiddleford had snorted, commenting: “As if any foreign music could hold its own against American Soul,” and Stan had chimed back with: “Yeah, but The Hollies had  _‘Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress’_.”

The engineer had swung around then with pure fire in his eyes, jabbing a socket wrench at the bartender like it was a long, chastising pointer finger, and had thundered: “Motown will  _always_  be superior. African Americans invented  _jazz_ , Stanley.  _Jazz_. Now, shut up and put on that first 45” by Stevie Wonder.”

And Stan had obliged, sitting down on the carpet as he watched Fiddleford fall back into the pace of his tinkering; bobbing his head, mouthing along with the chorus like he’d forgotten Stan was even there.

If his heart could have physically become any softer, it would have melted right out of his chest.

The sensation had remained throughout the heavy petting that Fidds had tackled him with not long after, and had only bloomed wider in the sunny face of afterglow. (As if the sight of half-dressed Fiddleford riding him like it was the goddamned Triple Crown wasn’t enough to inspire soft, smitten feelings in the first place.) The following indolence saw Fidds reaching over the end of the bed to thumb through a ratty hardcover novel, while Stanley simply watched; the affection in his breast growing playful, adoring.

He only ever felt this relaxed around  _Stanford_.

Fiddleford raked his metal hand through his hair, stoic to the gentle caress the younger man brushed against his sleeve. “At least you’re sorry,” he huffed.

Stan pressed his lips to the engineer’s shoulder for a solid second, before lowly crooning: “Yeah, I’m sorry…  _Fiddlesticks_.”

Fiddleford jerked away and smacked an open palm against Stan’s hairy chest as the younger man fell over onto his back, bellowing with laughter.

“You big dumb  _fuck_ ,” Fiddleford snapped, angrily plunking open his book and fixing his gaze onto the text.

Stanley’s laughter began to peter out, losing its hoarse, baritone cackle in favour of throaty giggles that kept his smile broad and his cheeks painfully, wonderfully ached. He snuffled a hand over his mouth and nose, naked chest rising and falling with a steadying inhale, and he wobbled his glasses as he rolled his head over, looking up at Fiddleford.

A feather-light fingertip trailed down the engineer’s jaw as Stan proudly announced: “Yeah, but I’m  _your_  big, dumb fuck.”

Stanley was too pleased with himself to notice the exact kind of uncomfortable edge that tightened itself around Fiddleford’s expression.

 

. .:. .

 

Stan was absolutely adorable, Fiddleford eventually decided.

Stanley spent the night last night and had been gone from the Manor early that morning, but now, for some reason, Fiddleford’s mind wouldn’t focus on any non-Stan-related subject for longer than a handful of seconds.

He’d been trying to cross-check the parameters of this contract for the better part of an  _hour_. The pages had been neatly laid side-by-side on the desk blotter, just the way Fiddleford liked it, and his pen was new and expensive smooth. He usually loved when he had to do this little ritual, knew he got the best kind of kick out of tearing apart all of the pathetic, spineless little concessions offered by his competitors.

_(Those fools at Sanchez &Sanchez thought they could throw him off their scent by burying their attachment to the relocation proposition in three-and-a-half pages of breakdown legalese, but Fiddleford was patient. Beyond patient-- he was attentive. He didn’t get to his current position of wealth and expertise by jumping the fucking gun and signing every dotted line someone threw his way. That was why Sanchez&Sanchez were flirting with bankruptcy, and MGL just finished buying up half of the strategic northwest. And, when it would come time for their CEO to finally auction off the remainder of his patents, Fiddleford planned to be sitting front-and-center, with his chequebook open on his knee.)_

He enjoyed contract negotiation but, damn it, right now he just could  _not_  think about anything else outside of his handsome, muscular pet bartender.

Fiddleford leaned back into his chair. He dropped his pen back onto his desk and watched as it clicked against the bronze lamp.

His eyes rolled to close as he tipped his chin up to the ceiling, wriggling the back of his head against the cushioned rest. In the private of his study, Fiddleford sighed, and let his brain go where it wanted.

_‘Fuck.'_

Maybe it was because Stan had asked--  _asked!_  --to suck Fidd off before he left this morning. (For someone who’d never done fellatio before being involved with Fiddleford, the boy was a damned natural.)

Stan’s  _sexy_  had been recognized by Fiddleford from day one-- as well as his  _fuckable_ ,  _gropable_ , and definitely his  _kissable_  --no matter how low the younger man’s experience. (He liked a challenge, to say the least.)

However, any ideas about Stanley Pines also possessing qualities like  _cute_  or  _darling_  had not initially registered with the engineer. Which was frustrating, to admit the least. Fiddleford prided himself on his observational skills.

Stanley had this…  _thing_ , where he quietly narrated his actions in singsong; half talking, half warbling an off-key adlib about whatever he was currently doing.  _“Tyin’ up my boooots so I don’t fall down in the roaaad and mess up my clothes, doodily-doo~”, “Wipin’ up sweat riiiings from the baaartop, ‘cause if I don’t, they’ll dry like ugly fuckin’ Os aaaall o~ver the place, deedily-dee~”_

Fiddleford reached out and traced a metal fingertip over the arc in the large printed ‘G’ in the MGL logo on his notepad.

It was a pointless, nonsensical habit to have, obviously a self-soothing holdover from his childhood. In a lot of ways, Stanley was _tedious_ \-- the quirks, the odd patterns of behaviour which didn’t always line up to make a smooth reception; if Stan were anyone else, Fiddleford knows he would’ve found all those things incredibly annoying. He probably would have fucked him a few times, left his mark, and then kicked him to the curb long before this point. But he’s heard Stan absently sing to himself nearly a hundred times by now, and Fiddleford hasn’t even had the inclination to slap him for it.

And, back to this morning-- Yes, Stanley was  _sexy_ , sure, and Fiddleford was aware he was becoming selfishly addicted to the freedom he had to touch all of that warm, firm flesh whenever he wanted…

_Thick brown hair slid out of his grip as the man pulled his head back, dropping Fiddleford’s softening cock from his mouth as he licked his lips. Fiddleford’s hands dropped as well, heavy with the laziness of blooming afterglow. Without being asked, Stanley tucked Fidd back into his briefs, and then zipped his slacks; even doing up the button._

_Fiddleford raised his left palm just enough to cup at a side of that strong jawline, relishing the feel of Stanley’s prickly stubble on his skin. “You’ll need to shave soon,” the engineer told softly._

_The open, adoring look that Stanley peeked up at him from beneath his dark brows would have been enough to knock him on his ass, had Fiddleford not already been sitting down._

_Stan’s face was strong, ruggedly masculine in the most stereotypical of ways, so Fiddleford was amazed by how easily it seemed to melt into softness when looking at him._

_Something about it made him feel strange._    
  
It was getting harder to objectify the man when Fiddleford saw him exist when he didn’t think someone was watching; saw him pinch the pink tip of his tongue between his lips as he concentrated, or when he got loud with clattering guffaws of laughter when he found something funny, or when…

It was getting harder to relegate the entirety of Stanley Pines within the limited function and category of “attractive thing I can fuck”.  
  
A new thought emerged, bringing with it a feeling like something hard and frozen being dropped into his gut. Spidery chills of sudden, overwhelming terror climbed under his skin, and Fiddleford clenched his metal fist around the carved ornamentation at the end of the armrest.  
  
The thought found itself words, and it spoke quietly in the back of his mind with his voice, like a traitor he hadn’t prepared for.

_‘Stanley **isn’t**  just anyone else.’_

The freezing sensation melted, leaving a charred, sour revulsion in his belly. Fiddleford suddenly felt a lot like he’d just learned he had a parasite; sick, disgusted, and wanting to crawl out of his own body.

Fiddleford could handle “sexy”. Fiddleford  _only_  wanted to handle “sexy”.

He wasn’t sure he could handle “cute”.

He wasn’t sure he particularly  _wanted to_.

 

. .::. .

 

September in Oregon was a lot like September in New Jersey: still hot, but with brisk winds that came from nowhere and made you rethink the choice to squeeze out another day of wearing short-sleeves and sandals.

Stanley had negotiated with Dan for a full-time day on, day off schedule after the new guy, Valentino, had proved himself more knowledgeable and trustworthy than just being limited to a part-time dabhand.

Durland had finally screwed up for the last time a few days prior-- tripping and drenching  _a whole pitcher_  on Multibear’s many faces --and hadn’t been seen since. Stan genuinely pitied the scrawny little bastard; there had to be  _something_  he could do, he thought. (Sherriff Blubs had seemed to take a shine to him, though. Maybe there was something there; Stanley knew the law could always do with granting another excitable know-nothing with near-limitless power.)

But, the greatest thing about his new schedule was all the  _time_  it freed up.

Stanford had burst into Lee’s room god-awfully early last Tuesday, visibly shaking from an overload of coffee and possibly the fumes of his own sheer genius as he babbled about  _“something big, Stanley, I’m so fucking close already! There’s an equation to all this, and I am so damn close to finding it, I could shout, bro!”_

The sight of his twin had Stanley immediately crawling out of bed to push Ford towards his bedroom shower, ordering a firm “Dude, you need to wash, and then you’re gettin’ into bed, I don’t fuckin’  _care_  what kind of numbers and shapes you’re seeing,” and then dialing a call to Cheryl while he waited for his brother to dry off. Lee had protested mightily, but even his renowned Olympic-level academic stamina was starting to burn out before the boxer’s eyes.

Lee had thrust the landline receiver into his twin’s tired face as he’d announced: “Isn’t just  _me_  callin’ you a dumb putz, broseph.”

After Cheryl had lovingly chewed a (loud, shouty) hole into Ford’s ear, Lee had vowed to stick around the cabin a bit more to help keep an eye on his twin. Stanford had been his stalwart minder since the playpen-- the debt was long overdue. And, whatever the nerd was busy scribbling about in his journals and filling stacks of official-looking files with  _had_  to be important, as well as probably kind’a dangerous. (Stan knew how his brother rolled, no matter how firmly the dork tried to protest.)

After work, he’d spend evenings at the cabin playing guinea pig/human forklift for his brother, and on his days off, he’d go see Fidd.  
  
Something tiny had begun to niggle in the back of his mind, and it told Stanley that it was very, very important that he stay on top of seeing Fiddleford as often as was possible.

Their dining out together had started to taper off. They didn’t have lunch anymore, even on the days when Stan wasn’t due at the Oak. Fiddleford had explained that the autumn season was when his company began its annual push for production, trying to build up for the winter showcases where all the funding for the next fiscal year would typically get secured.

The jargon had sounded attention-driftingly plausible enough, so Stanley genuinely tried not to mind. But, excuse bullshit or not, all the crap to do with going to meetings for MGL industry and playing patty-cake with people in higher places in the foodchain than Stan would ever reach, himself, only served to keep Fidds busy.

Stanford  _did_  mention that surprises kept a relationship fresh, and only meant that the other person cared enough to try.

He was kicking down the stand for his bike in the visitor’s parking as his plan rolled around like a proud cat inside his head.

The last time they’d spoken, it was the previous night on the cabin’s landline, and he was flicking off the kitchen light after he’d hung up when Stan got the idea. Their lunch “dates” had disappeared, because Fiddleford was too busy being King Career in the afternoons. Okay, that was fine. The bartender understood.

Well,  _today_ , Stanley was going to drag Fidd out for a fucking meal, even if he had to pick the nerd up and hold his wrists together around his waist on the bike.

That  _would_ be damn spontaneous and surprising, wouldn’t it?

He pushed through the front doors with a shoulder as he shoved his road goggles into his pack. The face of the building’s interior lobby is all glass and unpolished stone, and Stanley catches himself stopping to stare. There’s no chairs, save for two short, distantly-placed grey marble benches. No artwork; no color beyond monochrome, and a single shade of red. Maybe the Manor reflected how the missus liked to decorate, and this serious, glistening cathedral was how Fiddleford did the job.

Stanley walked past a tall sculpture, vaguely registering it was the same color of spat blood when Stan would get his lip split in the ring. The sculpture didn’t have a face, but it held a clipboard, and raised a glass vial up towards the skylight, catching perfectly timed rays of afternoon sunlight.

Sure wasn’t a velvet Elvis or a crying clown, but Stanley Pines knew he couldn’t  _exactly_  be held up as an authority on sophisticated décor.

He crossed the floor to a huge, curving stone desk that subtly blocked all incoming foot traffic from reaching the offices beyond. He rapped his knuckles in a nervous tap against the desk counter, drawing the attention of the dowdy, pink-faced woman sitting behind. “Yeah, uh-- Hi.” Stanley swallowed, cleared his throat. “I’m lookin’ for Fiddleford? He’s, uh…” The boxer adjusted his glasses as he groped for professional terminology. “…He runs this joint, right? He’s the boss?”

The woman’s face didn’t shift. If anything, her eyes squinted suspiciously. “Who are you, sir?” One of her hands moved towards the bank of black telephones situated in a curve on the interior desk.

He watched the hand. For as many times as he’d been  _escorted_  out of hoity-toity places like this by little hands like that dialing for security, Stanley knew he was running out of time. “I’m Stan. Stan Pines.”

The woman seemed to freeze; fingers hovering over the red button at the end of the phones. Her squint shot wide into a boggled, baffled expression.

When she didn’t move after a few seconds, Stan shifted from foot to foot, adjusting the hang of his jacket as he tore his eyes away from her. There was a large bronze Directory nailed into the stone wall above the desk, and the boxer’s eyes zeroed in on the polished  ** _CEO - WING 3._**

“You know what,” he began, feeling confident about his first idea as it twigged onto a new, rapidly-forming one, “I’ll just find him myself, doll, no need to give me an escort--”

He was swanning past the desk and halfway down the hall when the woman hung over the counter to squawk after him: “ _WAIT--!_  Sir, you can’t--!”  
  
“Elevator goes everywhere, right?” He asked as he entered the lift.

The doors shut before the secretary could shout something else.

 

. . .

The boldness that had taken him through the lobby and up three floors had left like the sudden, yet inevitable crash from a caffeine high.

Stanley shifted his pack down from his shoulder to one of his hands, discreetly winding the strap around his palm until it wasn’t as noticeable. He’d been walking through the MGL Headquarters for the last ten minutes, following each subsequent directory that kept pointing him in what he knew was the right direction, but an old, familiar tightness had climbed up his back somewhere around the first floor of cubicles, and it was pushing stiff, anxious fingers into the base of his skull as it demanded:  _‘The fuck are you doing here, Stanley?’_

This place was so  _classy_. It was an office building, but it was intimidatingly  _Important_  in the quietest, most obvious kind of way. Every glass wall he passed, every unrecognizable piece of machinery, every staring, intelligent face that craned their neck to observe him as he moved screamed to Stanley that he was definitely not in Kansas anymore.

That he-- in his stained blue jeans, his scuffed red tennis shoes, his secondhand T-shirt, his fucking leather jacket -- _did not_  belong here.

The boxer ghosted a hesitant hand against the end of a marble partition, listening to the indicative Appalachian patter of his lover’s speech, and tried to regulate his breathing. There was a stamped bronze plaque affixed to the wall above him: “CEO OFFICES”.

He licked his lips, trying to tamp down the apprehensive turning in his gut. There was a small group in the room with Fiddleford; austere, pinched looking people in perfectly pleated, somber suits, all with some kind of aloof, Scandinavian set to their features. They towered over where Fiddleford was leaning across a bunch of papers spread out on a massive conference table, but they all murmured easily as they held a discussion, clearly deferring to the small scientist. Fiddleford gestured to something printed on the paper, looking back to the nearest of the blonde giants, drawing a series of nods from everyone in his company.

Stan paused in the doorway. For some reason, he was acutely aware of the way his patched brown knapsack dangled crookedly from the strap in his hand. “…Um.”

Their quiet conversation immediately ceased. In a pointed, collective motion, every face in the small grouping turned as one to look over at Stanley (which did nothing to help the recoiling in his middle.)

_‘…Maybe we didn’t think this through, Stan.’_

Fiddleford’s expression didn’t shift. It retained the cool, impassive posture it’d had when he was talking to the suits.

“If you don’t  _mind_ , sir,” Fiddleford called out, a tactful plumminess ringing in his lilt, “I’m quite preoccupied. There should be a seat thataway for you to wait on.” He jerked his chin towards the wall beyond the conference room, just once, before turning instantly back to the blueprints before him; his associates mimicked the motion, effectively ignoring Stanley even stood there.

Stan blinked. A stress curled itself around his eyes as he felt himself frown. Eventually, he made it to the seat Fiddleford had mentioned-- an uninviting, cold bench of carved quartz --and sat like he’d been told.

The niggling in his head crept up again, but Stanley stared ahead at the boring, white marble wall instead of giving it any attention.

He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there, but eventually, those freakishly tall blonde people left the conference room, and then Fiddleford was stalking down the long corridor towards Stanley’s seat. He was in pinstripes today; a black-striped white dress blouse with black cuffs, collar, and a thin, red tie. There were even those smart, black elastic sleeve garters around his upper arms which matched his dark slacks.

Stan thought he looked fucking adorable.

But the expression on his face sure as hell wasn’t.

“What are you  _doin’_  here, Stanley?” Fiddleford demanded, voice low and even.

The bartender stood. “Uhh, I wanted to… surprise you.” He stretched his arms out a little by his sides, before dropping them back to hang by his hips. “Yeah, uh, the parking entrance was closed, so I strolled in the front. The girl out by the desk seemed to know me-- I think. She, uhh, heh. Her eyes got all wide when I said who I was.” He cracked half a grin and scratched at his stubble. “I, uh, I saw on the sign by the desk that the CEO’s office was this way, and-- I heard you talking!” All he could do was spread his hands, and offer the shorter man a nervous smile.

“...I’mon’a fire that woman,” Fiddleford muttered.

“Hey,” Stanley protested, eyebrows tilting up at the idea, “she didn’t do anything wrong, Fidd, I just wanted--"

“It has been a long day,” the engineer murmured to himself, ignoring Stan. He rubbed a curled finger over his chin as he thought. “I should take a break.”

“That’s the spirit,” Stanley grinned. He reached over to grab his bag, shouldering it again as he announced: “Now, Dan told me about this neat little burger joint with real Cadillac seats; I figured we could--”

“Oh, that’s not gon’a happen,” Fiddleford dismissed. Stan’s mouth snapped shut.

The engineer peeked up at him from beneath his brows, glasses having slipped down his nose. He gave Stanley the curling kind of grin that always went right to the soft, warm spots in the younger man’s chest. “But I’ll tell you what will happen,” Fidd offered. He turned on his heel with a quick: “Come with me.”

Turns out, Fiddleford’s CEO office was across from the conference room, and had its own private restroom. With a  _chaise_ , of all things.

Stanley hoped all that glass and stone beyond the sealed room of the lavatory was soundproof, because he couldn’t remember if he’d been quiet.

He was frowning at his bike after he realized he’d somehow made it back outside, into the parkinglot.

Lunches were… not an option, anymore, apparently.

At least Fiddleford had kissed him goodbye before he’d told Stanley to get the hell out; that was spontaneous, right?

_‘Right?’_

 

. .::. .

 

“Hey, um, Fidds--”

“Yeah?” The engineer looked back at Stanley as he peeled off his button-up. He’d already lost his pants and his briefs, and Stan was momentarily distracted by the creamy swell of his ass peeking out from where it was tucked behind his heels as he kneeled on the couch. Stanley was in the middle of pulling off his shirt; his own pants on the floor beside Fidd’s slacks.

“I, uh…” The bartender faltered, hands fidgeting on the hem of his Y-fronts. “Well, I mean, I’ve been wanting to talk to you ‘bout that time at the office--”

Fiddleford maneuvered around to face him once he was totally naked, still on his knees. Stanley couldn’t help his stare (it wasn’t necessarily because of the half-mast erection his lover was sporting, either.)

The engineer had decided they should switch up their locale; he’d pulled Stan into this large, tall-windowed sittingroom that overlooked the mountains staggering around below. At first, Stanley had wanted to back out-- this wasn’t private  _at all_  --but Fiddleford had pressed him up against the wallpaper with a knowing hand shoved through his fly, inspiring memories of their first time on The 4th, and Stan had caved to his lover’s wishes like a fucking house of cards.

He threw aside his T-shirt and swept hands up to Fidd’s nipples, smiling softly at the hitched breaths.

It was starting to hit Stanley more and more these days; the differences between them.

Fiddleford was wiry, short-limbed,  _petit_ \-- He had soft, paler skin than Stanley that didn’t stay bruised for very long (despite how he apparently got off on the times when Stan would get away from himself and dig half-moon crescents into his hips, his thighs, his lower back as he manhandled Fiddleford into a new position.) Fiddleford was dotted with subtle, light-colored moles in the most  _interesting_  of places, while Stan was freckled along the tops of his shoulders, the slopes of his cheeks, his knees. Stanley was brawny, stereotypically masculine in comparison, but Fiddleford had a strength to him that Stan didn’t realize at first. He had  _stamina_ , like he’d done track or something in school. Stan had had to learn how to pace himself.

Stan  _loved_  these differences. He loved how he could basically pull all of his lover against him and have room to spare, how he could cup his hands up slim calves, thighs, and still find a plush backside to grab.

And, he loved--

Fiddleford was  _funny_. The man had a dry, scary-quick wit that could have Stanley busting a gut before the bartender really even knew how he’d gotten there, crying with hilarity. Fidds was just as inventive with his insults as he was with his work. He had an ugly, horseish kind of laugh (which was also sort’a goddamned  _precious_ ), and liked to read trashy scifi novels when he was bored. He smoked. He was a natural blond, even if it did grow darker in his stubble, his pubes.

Also, for such a little guy, he was really,  _really_  dominant--

“Harder,” he commands Stanley, panting as he stretched closer to the seat of the couch in a flattened position of lordosis. “ _Haa--Harder_ , damnit.” When his lover obeys, the sound that leaves Fiddleford’s mouth is more a breathy, pleased croon than a proper moan; his fingers curling around the rounded sweep of the armrest as he dug blunt nails into the fabric.

\--which Stanley had no idea he would find to be  _the hottest thing._  How was he supposed to know he’d feel happiest when being sexually bossed-around by a skinny hayseed with probably a solid 50 IQ discrepancy on him? Stan remained a little in fear of accidentally breaking Fiddleford, if he really admitted it; that was probably why he stayed so eternally in awe of the older man’s hidden strength, his flexibility, the inherent, all-over limberness of Fiddleford being  _Fiddleford_.

He was screwed. And he knew it.

Fiddleford let him pet his skin like Stan was stroking a cat while the lingering hum of orgasm spread through the engineer’s veins.

“Hey,” the bartender said, voice a soft, warm puff against the shell of his ear. Fiddleford pressed back against where Stanley was spooned behind him. “Hmm?”

“I just… I wanted to talk to you about that bit at your office.”

“When you showed up unannounced,” Fiddleford clarified, “interruptin’ the middle of a very important meeting.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” Stan told. He skated a hand down his lover’s side, thinking about the phrasing of his next words. “…You acted like you didn’t know me, Fidd. Like. You called me ‘sir’, and told me to wait, like I was supposed to have an appointment.”

“What’s the problem?”

Stan can’t stop the deep frown that settles on his features. “…I’m just--” He stopped, closed his eyes. He pushed his nose into Fiddleford’s hair, sighing as that itchy distress pushed within his head again.

For the past few days, it’d been a pretty constant feeling.

He distracted himself with the smell of sweat and honeysuckle at Fiddleford’s crown. “I’m just… I’unno. I feel like you’re  _hiding_  me in public,” Stanley admitted.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Well, it’s how I feel. Fiddleford-- You own that place, you could’a just told everyone to get bent. You didn’t need to…” Stanley tries not to feel so attention-grabbingly dense. “You didn’t need to brush me off like a shmuck, Fidd.”

The sigh that he feels get heaved from the engineer’s belly is ungraceful, and  _exasperated_.

“Everythin’ in my line of work is about appearances, Stanley,” Fiddleford explains. “It’s eighty-five-percent looks, fifteen-percent actually producin’ somethin’a value.” He pulls the arm trailing along his flank over to his front, curling around it like a pillow. “Now, stop tryna  _look for problems_  and enjoy us bein’ together.”

Stan reflexively adjusts so that he properly wrapped the smaller man in his arms, and tried to ignore how Fiddleford’s… answer, hadn’t addressed his concerns.

Not at all.

 

. . .

They might not Talk, like, as in  _“capital ‘T’ Talk”,_ but Stanley remembered every single moment that moved between himself and Fiddleford McGucket. Every offhand mention of a favored cuisine, every telling turn of phrase about some film, or some television star; every subtle reference towards something having happened in his (firmly avoided, viciously locked) past-- Stan remembered them all. He figured those miniscule, scattered moments had to count; interpreted, rose-color schmaltz, or not. They  _had_  to.

If they didn’t--

When Fiddleford would press his mouth to Stan’s, right in the middle of the bartender’s words, or drop to his knees until Stanley couldn’t remember feeling strange and stressed; when he’d make Stanley come in his pants like a teenager in one of the Gnarly Oak’s stalls, or pull him out in front of god and everyone in the front seat of the Bentley, when he’d demand Stanley  _“Shut the hell up and hoist me up against that there wall right fuckin’ now”_  in a corridor around mid-day, he was almost convinced those moments most assuredly counted.

If they didn’t, then it meant  _Stanley_  was the one with too much invested.

And he didn’t know what he’d do if he learned Fiddleford felt…

…Some way else.

 

. .::. .

 

“So,” Victoria started. “What are you trying to take from  _this_  one, Fiddleford?”

“Hmm?” He tapped the tip of the solder into the joint, watching through his magnifying lens as the flux protected the reaction, wisps of smoke signifying a successful bridge. He waited until the drop of cadmium-silver puddled into the groove and went still, before he set aside his handtool and leaned back, looking over at his wife.

This sittingroom was the main one where semi-casual company would be entertained, and every inch of its wide, vaulted square-footage reflected the spare minimalism of the wealthy, fashionable elite.

Fidd stubbornly remained uncharmed by the loud color vomit of the current decade’s geometric obsession, even going so far as to feeling personally annoyed by the deliberate arrangement of form over function; but his associates adamantly kept up with the Joneses on a near-religious level, and Fiddleford Hadron McGucket, brilliant CEO bastard extraordinaire, had a  _reputation_  to uphold.

Plus, around this time of day, the mirrors set into the wall helped the room get the best lighting.

Victoria was across the rug, reclining primly on a white upholstered chaise. The woman insisted on mimicking the clothing choices of Hollywood, and wore polyblend athletic wear and denim like some kind of confused, cold-sensitive gymrat.

“Do you need me to repeat the question?” She asked him, splaying the fingers of her left hand wide before herself as she admired her nails. “I thought only your  _hand_  was crippled, not your ears, as well.”

“If you would so condescend yourself,” Fiddleford returned calmly, “then you’d be spendin’ at least  _one_  moment of your day not wasting oxygen.”  
  
“So catty,” Vicky tutted. She pulled her hand back to her lap and worked on evening a corner of nail with a thin, pink file. “Is that what the boys like nowadays; a catty cripple?”

“Better than a bottle-blonde with basset hound labia,” Fiddleford muttered, turning back to his project. He didn’t need to shout his ugliness when he bantered with Victoria; the bitch had ears like a bat, and gave as good as she got.

“I  _do_  want to know what you’re planning to swindle from this one, husband,” Victoria stated. She didn’t even pay him the courtesy of validating his insult.

“Don’t call me that,” Fiddleford ordered.

Vicky blew dust from her fingertips. “Divorce me, then.”

A snort. “You won’t let me.”

A cackle. “ _Oops_.”

“Know about what one, now?” Fiddleford asked, finally giving in to the woman’s original line of conversation.

“I’m just wondering what you’re planning to steal from this one, is all,” Vicky elaborated. “He’s got no money, and if he did, you’d just have more.”

“Damn right,” Fiddleford stated.

“He’s got no assets, I’m assuming,” Vicky stated, leaving the phrase open-ended to court an answer.

“He’s got a motorcycle, a leather jacket, a duffle bag of thriftstore clothing, and a pair of ratty boxing gloves.”

“So: nothing, basically.”

“Basically.”

“No money, no property, no stock portfolio-- Is he related to royalty? Is he set to inherit a small European nation, Fiddleford?”

“Not that I know of,” the engineer told. “He’s a blue-collar Jew from New Jersey.”

“And you’re a  _no-collar_ scholarship hayseed from Kentucky!” Victoria said brightly.

Fiddleford quickly spun around in his seat, gripping the backrest as he shot out: “ _You_  are the child of felonious trash who would have wound up a strung-out lot lizard, tuggin’ truckers for pennies until you died syphilitic and bloated  _in a ditch_  somewhere, had you not managed to marry a wealthy closet-case desperate enough to  _have_  your dough-faced ass.”

Victoria stared, mildly impressed. “Yikes.”

Fiddleford held her gaze for a couple of seconds, before righting himself in his chair. “I’m not sorry.”

“You never are,” Vicky commented, airily. “But, for real, though-- What are you getting from Stanley Pines? I mean, aside from the obvious.”

“Well,” Fiddleford picked up his soldering gun again. “The obvious.”

“Ooh, let’s talk about that, then. That boy looks  _firm_ ; he  _has_  to be. Tight like bratwurst,” Victoria commented. “I bet you could bounce a nickel off that butt.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I really bet you could, though,” she continued, smirking as she saw pink flush the tips of Fiddleford’s ears and the tell-tale sign of him clenching his jaw. “And, I mean, regarding  _the obvious_. He was a virgin, wasn’t he? A virgin to men, I mean; no way any woman in her right mind would have passed up on  _that_  ride if she had the chance to be so inclined. Wasn’t he was a boxer, too? Of course he was, just _look_  at that upper body. Those  _hands_ , wide enough to pull all of you close, all at once. Probably has the stamina of a pack horse, too. Tell me, Fiddles, dear; how long can he last when you’re--”

“Do ya want fer me t’ choke you t’death while you’re sleepin’ tonight,  _Victoria?!”_  Fiddleford snapped, voice climbing high and loud.  
  
But Vicky went unfazed. (A happy outcome to being married to the short-tempered little prick.)

She tilted her head, studying him.  
  
“…You’re not planning to take anything from him at all, are you, Fiddleford?”

Fiddleford ignored her.

“You never were, were you?” Victoria’s voice was knowing. “It wasn’t about an actual end result when you went after him, was it?”

Fiddleford reached up and rubbed his eyes, adjusting his glasses with an angry sigh.

“You liked him. You  _like_  him.”

“Will you  _please_  shut up?”

“Not that I care,” she admitted, looking back at her nail file. “But, for something like this, someone like  _you_  can only screw it up. If your pet bartender was any other kind of obstacle, I don’t think you’d care how badly you made them crash and burn if hurting them meant you were getting to keep some  _Thing_  at the end of it all. But, you’re not after a thing with this guy. You’re after  _the_ _guy_.  _You_ , a man who hisses away from emotion like a vampire does to sunlight.”

“Do you ever shut up?”

“Fiddleford.”

He looked over at his wife. Victoria was buffing the cuticle of her left thumb. She said: “This might be your only chance at redemption. Don’t fuck it up.”

Fiddleford breathed. Inward, outward, inward, outward, until he felt his tongue unstick from the roof of his mouth.

“Redemption,” he parroted. And then he spat: “You are so  _stupid_.”

He levered himself up out of the chair and left the room.

Vicky clucked her teeth.

“He’s going to fuck it up.”

 

. .::. .

 

Autumn had shrank and warped like a dead leaf, all traces of summertime heat completely gone as the people of Central Oregon began to hope for days that stayed “mostly chilly” over the increasingly-regular of “threateningly cold”.

The upsides were kind of obvious, when he thought about it-- The colder it was, the more that customers didn’t want to leave. And when customers didn’t want to leave a bar, they drank more; when they drank more, they tipped bigger.

And the colder it was, the more that Fiddleford seemed to want to keep Stanley wrapped around him like a second skin at night.

He went to sleep with the smell of him in his nose; he went to work with the smell of him on his clothes. Not only did that constant, lingering scent inspire ideas of remembered warmth, not only did the smell send the expected blood pooling south-- The smell of _Fiddleford, Fiddleford, Fiddleford_  kept his heart feeling soft, and sure.

You didn’t get to feeling this way if it wasn’t--  
\--if it wasn’t  _real_. 

 

. . .

Fiddleford skipped the last step on the staircase and tugged the ends of his sweater sleeves through his blazer’s sleeves. “I’m meeting the Motorola people today,” he announced to the foyer. “Those bastards like a more somber look.” Stanley was leaning against the left volute at the end of the railing, watching him. “I think you look killer, Fidds,” he said.  
  
“I’m wearin’ the  _hell_  out’a this turtleneck,” the engineer stated absently, glancing into his reflection in a nearby mirror, “of course I look killer, Stanley.”

Satisfied with his appearance, Fiddleford turned back around to the stairs, passing them on his way to the garage. “Alright, I’m not going to see you tonight, so don’t--”

But he was stopped when Stanley’s hand came out and gently circled around Fiddleford’s wrist.

That solid palm was already slipping down to weave fingers between Fiddleford’s own and Stanley’s other arm was tucking him close against a solid, muscled flank before the engineer could even form a question.

Stan ducks his head and rests his chin in the soft crook between Fiddleford’s neck and shoulder, his nose pushing into the short curls of hair at Fidd’s nape.

“Stanley,” Fiddleford tries, “ _what_  are you--”

A long, breezy feeling chills his neck for a moment, before Stan releases the breath in a warm whoosh of air.

Stanley just  _smelled him_.

“I’m sorry, but.” The bartender’s voice is deep, gravellier than usual, and something about it makes Fiddleford’s gut flip around a little.

“I can’t get’cha out’a my head, Fiddleford,” Stan admits, tone hushed and-- something like reverent.

The warm bloom that spreads in his middle and heats his cheeks is so strong, and so sudden, that its pleasance is downright  _terrifying_.

Fiddleford yanks himself back and out of the younger man’s arms faster than his brain can process the motion. Stanley is momentarily still, stuck in the pose he’d made around the shape where Fiddleford once stood, until he blinks; like releasing himself back into reality. The younger man straightens up, looking over to Fiddleford with a confused frown.

“Fidds…?” The deep lines of hurt carving into Stanley’s brow are both incredibly attractive and incredibly awful. The sight makes panic wash hot-cold in his ribs, rippling with the stuttered pound of his heart, because--

He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out after: “I…”

The expression Stanley gives him is caught between hopeful, hurting, and unconsciously, openly loyal.

\--Because he wanted to touch that brow, wanted to babble apologies, wanted with such a foreign intensity to smooth away the pain on that face that he absently wondered if he would go sick from it.

Fiddleford closed his mouth, aligning his teeth with a firm line of his lips. “Go,” he orders, hating how there’s an uncharacteristic crack in his voice. “Stanley--  _go_.”

Fiddleford would have rather kicked a dog and watch it limp than watch the disappointed slouch of Stanley’s shoulders disappearing through the side-door for the garage. The muffled growl of the Triumph driving away feels like poison in his gut.

The knowledge makes him… so,  _so angry_.

 

. . . 

Stanley shakes snow from his jacket as he stomps his shoes over the mat.

“Hey, bro,” Ford calls out.

“Hey, Stan,” Lee returns. He makes it into the living room and finds a machine shop had upended itself over every flat surface. “…What the fuck is all this?” Stanley asks. Leave it up to his brother to have a distraction ready when Lee needed it most.

Stanford’s head popped up from behind one of the larger, curving pieces beyond the armchair. Most of the bigger parts had been pushed up against the distant wall, it seemed. “My research has  _progressed_ ,” Ford emphasizes. He’s grinning like the sun itself, bright enough to make the dark circles of his eyes seem lighter. “I phoned the switchboard for the University, and the head of Physics hooked me up, Lee!” He raised his arms in an excited ‘V’. “I’m about to revolutionize the entire paranatural field, man! This is  _huge!”_

The last time he’d seen his brother this elated was right before they’d made the move to Gravity Falls.

But Stanley couldn’t make himself share in the feeling.

The sensation of Fiddleford’s scratchy tweed jacket yanking itself out of his grip remained stung onto his skin.

Ford reached for a notepad and pulled the pen from behind his ear. “What’s up with you, bro? You been copacetic?” He asked the question in absence, his mind clearly absorbed elsewhere and shamelessly thrilled to be so.

Stanley worked his tongue in his mouth, pressing together his back teeth as he breathed.

In, out. In, out. In…

 

_“Go. Stanley-- go.”_

 

…Out. 

Lee pushed up his glasses, swallowing. “Y-yeah, Stanford. I’ve been-- I’m fine, yeah.”

“Good, that’s good…” Ford sang, scratching his pen across the paper in his fist. “Hey, pass me that tape-measure, will you?”

 

. .::. .

  

He hadn’t been to the Manor in over a week.

Fiddleford hadn’t called, hadn’t come around the Oak-- Stanley hadn’t even seen the Bentley travelling anywhere on the roads in town.

A terrible, nauseous discomfort had coiled itself into his gut and had refused to leave; like a horrible, stomach-bound twin for the niggling anxiety that had been pestering him since mid-August. It wormed its way into his sleep, into his appetite-- it made him defensive, and rude. He hadn’t been tipped as well in the last few days, but Stanley was so distracted by the razored, worried heat in his middle that he really couldn’t fucking care.

And then, like nothing had happened: A call.

There was some big thing happening at the Manor, some kind of important party--  _“I’d like for you to come up, Stanley.”_

Fiddleford had sounded a lot like that first time he’d given Stanley a ride in the rain. Calm, genial.

The bartender had latched onto that voice, onto the emotions that voice flared back to life inside of him like a man drowning would grab for a hanging branch.

 

. . .

“Damn party’s already set to start,” Fiddleford grumbled, “and those  _fools_  from the Great Lakes group just faxed me a bucket’a absolute _horseshit_.”

There was an accordion of freshly printed dot matrix paper spread out like a pleated explosion across his desk, and the engineer was combing over it with a keen, precise kind of hatred spearheaded by a thick red marker. “Like I don’t already got ten million things to sort out on this end,” he griped. “I find someone done hired a handful’a dribblin’  _babies_  to work my northern office.”

He dropped the marker and grabbed up an ink pen from the brass holder by his elbow, writing something in sharp strokes across one of the pages; scowling murder the entire time. “Damn trust fund brats ain’t been off the tit long enough to be of any real use,” Fiddleford muttered. “They think they can get daddy t’buy ‘em a degree,  _and_  a title in my company? Hell no. Tomorrow, I’m firin’ the whole batch. The  _whole office_. Incompetent, mouth-breathin’  _fools_.” He stopped only long enough to cock his head to the side as he read what he’d just written. He murmured a little under his breath, his scathing tirade apparently not quite over. “Should’a stayed in Stepford and squat out more li’l WASPs, instead, I swurdda _god_.”

“…Uh.” Stanley began, hesitant. “…Should I… go?” He held his overnight duffel in one arm, and a loose thumb slung back over one of his shoulders. For some reason, he felt unsure about even offering the suggestion.

Fiddleford blinked. He stared at the paper for a moment longer before finishing his note and leaning back upright. He set down his pen and turned a little, watching Stanley thoughtfully.

Stan tried not to move when their eyes met.

It was another second before the older man’s expression bent into a slight frown, and he was shaking his head-- apparently at himself. “No, I  _want_  you here,” Fiddleford told. The venom he’d been spitting not a minute before sounded totally gone.

But Stan still felt his brow crinkle, and his bottom lip get tight. Unspecified worry splashed a brief cold in his chest. “…Are you sure?”

“I’m always sure,” Fiddleford answered calmly, crossing the rug to hold Stanley’s shoulders.

He gazed up at the younger man. “And I want you here.” That thoughtful tilt was back at his mouth. “But, first--”

He dropped a hand down to one of Stan’s own, curling his fingers around a callused palm and tugging it with him as he started to walk. Obediently, Stan followed. “--You can’t go wearin’  _that_ ,” Fiddleford finished.

“What d’ya mean?” Stan asked. Absently, he adjusted his wrist in the other’s grip until their hands were properly twined together.

A giddy flutter went through Stanley’s middle at the feeling of Fidd’s shorter, thinner fingers slotting into place between his own; small enough, but not delicate or bony. A perfect fit. _‘It’s always a perfect fit.’_

Fiddleford pretended to ignore the change and kept them walking. He clenched his teeth in his mouth at the affectionate squeeze Stanley pressed against his palm.

The engineer led them through what looked like a large sitting room, down a few hallway intersections, and then into a long, high-ceilinged corridor. Stan could only glance at things as they passed; this was a part of the Manor he hadn’t been in before.

“Are we on the other end right now?” He asked, words popping out unbidden as he tried to take in as much detail as he could. They weren’t moving fast but Stan’s eyes, so accustomed to noticing expensive detail, were flicking from mirrored sconces to acrylic-and-crystal lamps and back to dark hardwood moulding so glossily polished he could see his passing reflection.

“Yes, this is Victoria’s side,” Fiddleford acknowledged. He didn’t seem to be paying as much attention as Stanley was. “She’s much more interested in fillin’ this stupid house with  _things_  bought with my money than I am.”

“Oh,” Stan spoke. “Uh… Why do I have to change?”

Fiddleford glanced back at him over his shoulder, doing that quick, heated once-over thing that always left the bartender’s knees a little weak. “Well, while  _I_  appreciate your attire,” Fiddleford chuckled, “I’m afraid the company on this guest list won’t.”

He slowed in front of a door wallpapered with a gaudy, velvet Memphis-Milano pattern, and pushed it open. “Or they’ll like it too much and, well, you know I can’t be havin’  _that_ ,” he added.

It was a wardrobe. A  _massive_  wardrobe, one of those proper, full-fucking-room kind of deals where everything was floor-to-ceiling with expensive threads and designer attire. The carpeting was a textured pattern match for the outside of the door but colored in another fugly combination of purples and reds. Through the worn soles of his tennis shoes, Stan could feel it was absurdly plush.

Stanley whistled, looking around from where he stood. Fiddleford dropped his hand and moved off towards one of the walls, picking through the closest rack of what looked like suit jackets.

“There’s bound to be somethin’ in this room that fits you,” he told, pushing hanging dresscoats from one hand to the other after he took a split-second to scrutinize each subsequent garment. “The help are measured with a dresser here when they’re hired,” he told, “and, I know Victoria has some designer friends who’re often leaving pieces behind. Those men are every shape and size under the fuckin’ sun,” he added.

“What does Vicky do with designer clothes for men?” Stanley asked. He’d set down his duffel by the door, and was starting to peel off his jacket. He wandered over to an adjacent rack, draping the leather over a bare section of pole before starting to paw through a section of slacks. The quality of these few pairs of pants alone probably valued more than all of the clothing Stan had ever worn in his entire life; even counting that lacy heirloom number he’d had to suffer for his and Lee’s bar mitzvah.

“I try not to get too involved in the affairs of the woman who is my wife,” Fiddleford explained blithely, “but I’m sure this ridiculous trove of menswear has to have something that can fit your form comfortably.”

Stan looked up at Fiddleford and grinned. “Alright,” he joked, “misstra know-it-all.”

Fiddleford looked back, and returned the smile. But it didn’t to reach his eyes.

Stan felt his cheeks fall as familiar nervousness chewed itself back into his middle _. ‘A reflex.’_  A tiny part of Stanley had been hoping he would catch a glimpse of another real, genuine emotion from Fiddleford with the joke, but…  
  
Maybe he was hoping for too much.  
Something was… off.

The shorter man pushed back through a few more of the coats before he caught sight of his watch. A swear tore out of his mouth. “Sonofa _bitch_. I need to go.”

Stan dropped the pantsleg he’d been inspecting, turning away from the rack. “What about me?” He asked.

“Just find something and make your way down to the main hall,” Fiddleford said. He gestured at the far wall where a small carpeted platform had been set into the floor in front of a pair of large mirrors. “There’s ties and belts and things on that wall there,” he supplied, “and don’t forget the shoes.”

Stan self-consciously glanced at the indicated section. “Alright. Anything else?”

“Just one more thing.”

He didn’t have time to make a question before Fiddleford was in front of him and winding his arms around Stan’s thick neck, and kissing the brains out of his head. The younger man immediately relaxes, breathing out through his nose as he slouches over Fiddleford, submitting to the kiss as he tastes another tongue curling cleverly with his own.

For a brief, absorbing second, Stanley felt just like he did back at the start of all this-- lighthearted, untroubled, excited to just stand in the smaller man’s presence; let alone be able to  _kiss him_  --and the sensation was momentarily overwhelming.

Fiddleford pulled back just enough to breathe, and so that Stanley could see his face. The engineer pushed a finger up the arch of his nose, repositioning his glasses, keeping the gaze they held.

Stanley couldn’t help the tender, fond hand that came up and settled against the engineer’s slim cheek; a strong thumb tracing a gentle curve over the arch leading away from the engineer’s nose.

The devoted softness in those dark brown eyes made Fiddleford want to scream.

He stepped back. The bartender’s touch fell from his face like a burn from a brand.

Heart hammering, Fiddleford licked his lips. “Just get dressed.”

The quiet that filled the room after the door had shut was heavy, and cold.

Stanley worked his jaw, trying to ignore the lingering sensation and taste of Fiddleford’s kiss. He pulled off his glasses and pinched in between his brows, swallowing, willing his lungs and throat to stop feeling hot.

When he returned his glasses to his nose, he looked at the clothing hanging behind him like he was facing down a dead-eyed heavyweight on the last round.

_‘Just get dressed, Stanley.’_

 

. . .

“Hey--” 

Fiddleford was looking over a clipboard when he heard Stan’s murmur. He turned, and paused.

“… _Wow_.” The engineer chuckled, though not unkindly. He moved closer, further into the half-hidden alcove where Stanley had appeared. Fiddleford fingered the seam of one of the black suit jacket’s sleeves. “Where’d you find  _this_  ancient piece of history?”

“Do I look okay? This was all I could find that fit,” Stanley told. The suit  _was_  comfortable, and it hung easily enough over his frame that Stan could actually imagine wearing it again.

But, it didn’t look anything like the getups these other guys were sportin’.

Fiddleford leaned close, and pecked a kiss on Stanley’s mouth. The chaste, fleeting little motion worked into his tension like an ax cleaving wood. For one, glorious moment, Stan lost all sense of nervousness.

“You look fine, sugar,” Fiddleford soothed. His voice dropped to that wonderful, comforting register Stanley adored, and had sorely missed. “I like the cut of it on you.”

A self-conscious tilt of a smile pulled at the bartender’s mouth. “Thanks. I, uh-- Like what you’ve had done to the place.” He nodded out towards the hall. “Lovely party, or what?”

The engineer looked back over his shoulder, gaze sweeping over the expansive crowd, and the opulent setting. “Yep. Fuckin’ lovely,” he noted. “A big ol’, lovely house to play pretend,” Fiddleford murmured. There was a new kind of hardness pinching around his eyes, barely noticeable from behind his glasses. But, Stanley stared at him so much, he saw the shifting for what it was almost immediately.

But then Fiddleford was brushing invisible dust from Stanley’s lapel with his metal hand, rearranging the dangle of the younger man’s string tie, and then he shot Stan a closed-lipped, humorless smile.

“Wish me luck,” he stated.

And then he disappeared into the crowd.

 

. . .

This was a mistake. This was a  _huge_  fucking mistake.

Stan had hidden himself away in an anteroom, lurking in the discreet hallway bend that led to the restrooms _. ‘It’s like junior prom all over again.’_

God. These people were the _worst_.  
He hadn’t expected Fiddleford to be one of them.

At first, Stanley had been fine. The bar was open, the band was playing good tunes; no one was trying to talk to him--

But then… He’d gotten  _lonely_.

Stanley didn’t know these people. He could pick up on wealth and power like anyone else with eyes probably could, but even if he knew whom among those had the  _smallest_  bank account, he’d still have no earthly clue what to say.

He’d tried to find the engineer, but it’d--  
It’d been a repeat of that time in his office.

The eyes Fidds had turned onto him had been shuttered, and cold.

Something like dread knitted his stomach into painful, sour knots.

Was he just fooling himself? What the  _fuck_  did he think--

“Nice hidin’ spot, kid.”

Stanley looked up, and found Victoria McGucket standing across from him. The bartender had a sudden, gripping sense of déjà-vu consume him for a long, startling moment. He blinked at her. “I’m  _not_  hiding,” he huffed, pushing up his glasses.

“That scared way you keep watchin’ the crowd says otherwise, dude,” the blonde countered. She walked over, fluffy dress swishing like a taffeta nightmare, until she was beside Stan. Victoria turned to face the way he did, watching the crowd.

They didn’t speak for a moment or so. And then: “…What did Fiddleford do?”

He wanted to ignore her, wanted to pretend he was just fine over here in this gloomy alcove in front of the fucking bathrooms. He wanted to be left on his own to deal with whatever awful slow-motion breakdown he felt happening in his gut.

“…He acts like he doesn’t know me,” Stanley told quietly. He didn’t turn to face Victoria, but something told him she was listening. “In front of other people. I wanted--” An anxious clenching bit into his gut. “--I wanted to think this was a, a kind of rough patch, or somethin’. But.” Stan worked his jaw, dug a fingernail into the cuticle groove beside one of his thumbnails. He knew he was subtly flapping his hand against his thigh, but he was beyond caring what the woman could think of him right now. “But… It’s just gotten worse. Rough patches don’t get… get  _worse_.”

The loud, sympathetic sigh that falls out of Victoria’s mouth is the last thing Stanley thought he’d hear.

“Oh,  _kid_.”

He turned his face to hers just as one of her hands was settling onto his arm. “You’re in for a world of hurt, kid,” she warned. “I’m sorry, but you are. When in doubt--” Victoria moved her hand and slapped a kind palm a couple of times against the front of his suit. “--Trust your gut. ‘Specially when it comes to pieces of work like Fiddleford.”

Even if he’d wanted to question her advice, his mouth felt too numb to trust to form words.

Victoria raised her brow at him, before-- like in the kitchen --she wandered away.

Stan let out a rattling, deflating kind of breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

He needed a break.

The bathrooms for the main hall were spacious, double-room affairs, planned out with a bank of stalls and an attached pseudo-powder-room with couches, and a  _coffee table_ , for fuck’s sakes. In that moment, Stanley didn’t care how ridiculous it was; he was just grateful there was a quiet, mostly private place where he could pull off his glasses and try to ground himself for a little while.

 

_‘Things are different with Fiddleford. Everything is different with Fiddleford. Nobody’s asked us to stay the night, before. Nobody’s **wanted**  us to stay the night before. Stop freakin’ out, Stanley. Stop freakin’ out, Stanley. Stop freakin’--’_

 

“ _There_  you are.”  
  
Apparently, whatever kind of anxiety taking up residence inside his head was no match for the conditioned, bubbling flutter that twisted in his ribs at the mere sight of Fiddleford.

“Whoa,  _hey_ , you--” Stanley stood and practically caught Fidds as the man stumbled in past the swinging door. The bartender steadied the smaller man with a laugh, before he caught a familiar smell. “--Fidd, you are  _drunk_ ,” the younger man stated.

“Only a lil’,” The engineer told, leaning against Stanley. “I can’t talk t’these silver spoon assholes without some kind’a liquor cushion in me.”

“Well…” Stan adjusted the position of his hands, moving until they cradled his tipsy lover’s posture more than they held it upright. His thumbs moved in soothing semi-circles against Fiddleford’s sleeves. “You don’t need a liquor cushion with  _me_ , Fidds.”

“S’good you found this hidey-hole t’squirrel away in,” Fiddleford observed, ignoring his statement. “Because  _noooww_ …” He reached up, wove his arms around the younger man’s neck. The grin he turns up at Stan’s face is positively  _stunning_. “I can drag you down an’ focus on you as much as I want.”

Stanley feels his heart make a twist he hadn’t felt since after they’d first started this--  _thing_.

But. “Wait, you mean…?” He felt his brow crinkle. The suspicious worry from earlier returned to its coil just beneath his skin. “…You can only focus on me… now?”

“ _Weeell_ …” Fiddleford drawled, pushing Stanley down into a sit on the couch. He dropped between the bartender’s spread knees with a teasing grin. “I can’t exactly do  _this_  on the dancefloor, now can I--?”

Stan’s breath hitched as the engineer unbuttoned his suit jacket, and started on his fly. “I was talkin’ to Victoria, earlier--” He tried.

“Ugh, christ,” Fiddleford’s face made a disgusted twist at the younger man’s belt. “Do  _not_  bring up my wife when I’m tryna go down on you, Stanley.”

“W-Well, uhh, okay… But, we, we were  _talkiiii_ \--” That talented grip was wrapped around his cock, pulling a purposed drag along the shaft that showed Fiddleford knew  _exactly_  what Stanley liked. “-- _Aaah_ , fuck.”

“ _You_  need’ta stop talkin’,” Fidds murmured, wrapping his lips around the head of the burgeoning erection and suckling insistently.

His hips jerk, but he can’t stop his mouth. “It was--  _It_ \--”

There was an angry snarl he’d never heard Fiddleford make before. His sex was let go, and Fidd sat back on his heels. “Stanley Pines. Do you  _like_  havin’ sex with me, or not?”

Stan tried to breathe, pushing up his glasses. “Y-yes,  _yes_ , of course I do.”

The look the smaller man shoots at Stanley is like a dangerous challenge. “Then  _shut the hell up_ , and le’me get you  _off_.”

He was either the dumbest man on earth or the strongest man on earth in that moment; Stanley wasn’t sure. But he put his palms against his lover’s shoulders, pushing him away from cock as he spoke: “Why won’t you  _talk to me_ about this, Fiddleford?” The words fall out in a rush, fast and clear and out of his mouth before he could overthink them.

Something crossed Fiddleford’s face in a split-second stretch; a feral, petrified sincerity that is not quite swallowed up by a deliberate, dark glower of  _annoyance_. He doesn’t say anything. But he does turn his head, and his eyes, away from Stanley.

Stan has to take a moment to rearrange his clothes before he gets the message and stands up.

 “…I’m.” He licks his lips. “I’m leaving, Fidds.”

Fiddleford just looked so small, sitting like that on the floor. For one mad, desperate second, Stanley wanted to rush back over and kiss him until that strange, naked expression was totally gone from the engineer’s face.

“Go. Like I’mon’a stop you,” Fiddleford muttered. He didn’t look up from his lap. 

No one else noticed when Stanley Pines left the party.

 

. . .

“Staaan!” Blubs crowed from the bar. “You came in, after all!”

Dan was pulling a pint as Stanley approached. “…What’s with the suit?”

Before the bartender could reply, Susan piped up: “You look like a  _magician!_  Are you some kind’a magic man?” She asked.

“Yeah!” Blubs cried, pointing the lip of his beer bottle at Stan. “You a magician?!”

He’d forgotten it was almost Halloween.

“Yeah, I’m, uh--” He stopped, thought. _“--Mister Mystery!_ Master of… mystery!” He gave a jazzy little waggle with his hands, plastering on a dumb, crowd-pleasing smile. “I… I’unno.” The smile broke a little. “I’m tired, okay?”

Blubs scoffed, rolling his eyes with an exaggerated headtilt. “Mister Mystery, huh? What  _tricks_  you got, then?” The question was met with a chorus of agreements and demands for him to perform.

Stan looked around from where he stood behind the bar, eyes desperately scanning the array of equipment. “Wait a sec, folks, I’ve… I’ve goooot…”

In the box where he stuffed his waist apron was an old, unlabeled burlap sack that Stan thinks usually held coasters.

_“…The sack of mystery!”_

The amount of delighted ‘ _oooh’s_ and hoots of glee that followed the declaration proved how drunk the crowd truly was. There was even a discordant, yet enthusiastic smattering of applause.

He could work with that.

Stan thrust the sack forward above the bar. “Watch, and  _be amazed_ , dear yokels,” he proclaimed, “at the Sack of Mystery! It’s wondrous! If you put money into it, the money  _maaaagically_  disappears!”

Uncoordinated hands reached out from everyone seated along the entire bartop. One by one, they put in money they weren't even going to get to drink--  _and they did it with smiles on their faces._

“Tha’s sssso fuckin’, fuckin’  _stupid_ \--” Toby slurred, even as he dropped a fiver into the bag. “--A-and  _I love it!”_

One of the more wasted of the Manotaurs near the back roared: “DO IT AGAIN!”

“Bring me your cash!” Stanley returned. He was laughing, a bit too loud, maybe a touch wild. But the sensation of the laughing billows under his skin like a welcome breeze; endorphins singing where before he'd had anxious tension. “Just schlep right up, Pituitaur, and watch as your cash  _mysteeeeriously_  disappears!”

"Best. magician.  _ever_ ," Preston declares, looking at Stanley like he genuinely thought the bartender had wizard powers.

The tips he counts out later on, once Dan finally closes up, is three times the amount he’d make in a good week. The sight of all that easy, easy,  _so goddamned easy_ money fills Stanley with a stubborn kind of joy. He hadn’t done anything, and they just flung their cash at him.

He’s so fucking proud he left that terrible party.

And as he’s staring into his mirror, back at the cabin, Stanley traces the outline of the suit’s reflection with his eyes.

It really was a great suit.

_‘At least something good came out of this disaster of a night.’_

 

. .::. .

 

“Like this?” Stan asks, panting, his broad hands wrapping instinctively to hold steady around Fidd’s small hips, using his thumbs to help pull open and angle the meat of the engineer’s ass down over his cock.

He can feel the warm smears of lube he’s mindlessly painting with his fingers along Fidd’s lower belly, feeling the catch of sparse hair at his fingertips.

Fiddleford’s hands reach down and back to grab securely at Stan’s broader thighs, relishing the warm, wet stretch as he’s breached, and the stinging painpleasure of something significantly larger than a pair of fingers pushing deeper within him. He slowly rolls his hips back and brings his legs up a bit, shifting his weight to weigh on his hands as Stan does small, steady little thrusts until Fiddleford is seated completely in his lap.

Stanley’s furred pelvis cradles flush against his rim, and Fiddleford drops his head back against Stan’s broad shoulder as Fiddleford lets out a guttural moan, prompting Stanley to moan out something like _“Sweet Moses”_ under his breath.

“Ohh yes,  _yes_ , this is nice,” Fidd croons.

Stanley does an experimental thrust forward with his hips, plunging upwards into Fiddleford, and the engineer gasps. Stan pulls back and thrusts again, this time getting Fiddleford to dig his fingernails into Stanley’s thighs as Fidd pushes back into the next thrust, guiding Stan into a rhythm that has him reaching a hand forward to grip underneath one of Fidd’s thighs, and fist around Fiddleford’s cock with his other.

Somehow, this had become their new norm. The sex they were having had doubled, but--

Fiddleford wouldn’t let him do it looking at him anymore.

He wanted it done quickly. He wanted it done without eye-contact. He wanted Stanley to bend him over or hold him up and move like a machine.

The bartender was starting to feel  _used_.

 

. .::. .

 

“I need-- We need to talk, Fiddleford.”

“No, we don’t,” came the breezed return. “What we  _need_  to do is check the sturdiness of the end table. Take your pants off.”

“God, I just--” He fumbled with his belt. “I feel like we just--”

“ _Again_ , with how you  _feel_ ,” Fiddleford carped. “Stanley. It’s fuckin’. You  _know_  how it feels; it feels  _good_. Now, get undressed--”

His hands left his waist. Stan straightened up, even as his limbs tensed with fear. “No.”

 _“… ‘No’?”_ Fiddleford turns around. “I’m sorry-- did I just stroke out for a second?” He eyes Stanley with a sharp, probing assessment. “…Do you not want to have sex with me anymore, Stan?”

Courage he didn’t think he possessed buoyed his lungs, and worked his tongue to say: “Not unless I can see you, Fiddleford.”

The engineer doesn’t move.

Stanley sighed, combing fingers through his short brown hair. “I’m tired’a lookin’ at your back, Fidds,” he admitted. “I just want…” He shifts his feet, feeling awkward. “…I like to watch you, y’know. When we’re together.” Heat flushes in his cheeks, but he continues:

“It makes me feel… close to you.”

When Fiddleford remains unmoving, Stanley frowns a little. “…Doesn’t it, um. Doesn’t it for you?”

It’s a while, but eventually there’s a soft: “…Fine.” The older man says the word evenly. “ _Fine_. We’ll do it your way.”

The smile that brightens Stanley’s face is pure, relieved happiness, and it makes Fiddleford want to scream.

He’s halfway out of his shirt and kicking off his pants. “Get undressed, Stanley,” he orders.

The younger man is only too happy to obey, and when Fiddleford is naked, he climbs onto the bed and drags Stan into a bruising, rough kiss.

Already, everything’s  _off_.

Something isn’t aligning right; the dynamic is skewed. There’s no give in this kiss. Fidd usually  _had_  control, and Stanley was typically happy to give it, but tonight… it was like--

\--It was like he was trying to fight for control he already had.

“Fidd--  _Fiddleford_ , calm down--”

The engineer sucks at his lips in between calculated nips; never strong enough to break the skin, only strong enough to spark honest interest into Stanley’s libido.

Stan’s hands skate up the too-hot skin of Fiddleford’s sides, his back-- The brunet realizes the smaller man’s pulse is racing, and his hands, where they keep shifting their grip around Stanley’s thick neck and broad shoulders, are  _shaking_.

But there’s a deceptive strength in those short-fingered hands, and Fiddleford proves it by dragging his blunt nails down through the hair spilling across Stan’s chest that makes him groan.

A hard, prickling kiss is fixed over the thrumming pulse point in Stanley’s throat, tongue pressing to the stinging skin while an expert grip palms him into true, whimpering hardness, and then Fidds is pushing him  _back_ \-- Suddenly Stan’s flat, across the bed, and before he can come up to his elbows Fiddleford’s mouth is already between his legs, pulling him in to the root, sending the bartender prone as a harsh grunt leaves his lips.

“ _Fiddleford_ \--” The name catches in his throat when the engineer pulls up over his hips and makes a firm grip around the base of his cock and  _sinks right down_ ; already clenching.  
  
All sense of Fiddleford’s teasing finesse was thrown to the wind and exchanged for a saneless, urgent pursuit of fucking Stanley’s mind right out of his head.

“Why would you want to ruin this by puttin’ your  _feel_ \-- _feelings_  into it?” Fiddleford suddenly asks, words coming out breathy and shallow.

He tries to think, tries to register the words deeper than simply hearing them, but blood is rushing down, pooling, making his thoughts go wooly as Fiddleford rides him  _hard_.

Stanley’s mouth is dropped open, letting loose these low, little whines. His eyes hide nothing; the younger man’s mind-- his annoying sense of  _concern_  --has all but entirely checked out.

It was exactly what Fiddleford wanted.

“Why can’t-- you just--  _enjoy_ it, as it-- is?” He demands, biting out the phrase in starts on each clenching downstroke, keeping a near-punishing rhythm. He’s breathing high in his chest in order to steal air for his words. “Why, why does it  _ha_ \--have to be-- about-- _you?”_  The syllable climbs up half an octave as Fiddleford instinctively tilts his hips to align Stan’s cockhead with his prostate, going non-verbal for a series of thrusts; his fingernails digging in to Stanley’s sides as he makes this ragged little moan that’s drowned out by the throatier, hissing one that tears out of the brunet’s mouth.

He’s babbling strings of filthy, obscene things, most of them half-formed and unintelligible, but Stan can hear his name, God’s name, swears, and mindless, greedy praises for his cock that almost push the bartender careening over the edge into bliss.

Fiddleford stares down into Stan’s eyes as he snarls: “What made you so  _needy?”_

It’s perfectly timed, an instant, blinding burst of pleasure that robs the air from his lungs and sends him helplessly weak where he’s held down by Fidd’s weight. Stanley’s body is already singing with buoyant pleasure when Fiddleford pulls himself up one last time, circling his hips on instinct and rubbing that fantastic, incredible point of sensation over the hot pressure of the man’s cock until he can’t take it anymore.

As he comes down-- heart no longer a throbbing hammer in his ears, breaths evening back out as the afterglow fades --Stan realizes he’s lying alone.

Fiddleford is across from him, catching his own breath; only close enough to graze with Stanley’s fingertips.

A dazed, pawing hand tries to stretch across the distance, tries to keep that beautiful skin-on-skin contact.

But Fiddleford rolls further to the side.

It’s enough to have Stan’s brain scrambling, bucking against the weightlessness of afterglow as it tries to grope in on itself for explanation. All he finds are memory of what Fidd had been saying while he rode, those questions that made no--

Cold washes through him; vanishing all sense of pink and nice.

Fiddleford let out a whooshing sigh, levering himself up onto his bottom with a pleased grunt. He scooted to the edge of the mattress and swung his legs around over the side.

Stan watched his back move, looking over that pale expanse of skin, those red impressions from Stanley’s own fingers curving around his little waist.

A strange, hollowed-out sensation started to carve into his middle.

Fiddleford was pulling up his shirt from where he’d thrown it on the floor. He couldn’t see Stan.

_…Everything felt wrong._

“Now, don’t you feel better?” He asked, still not looking.

_Everything **was**  wrong._

“…No.”

The engineer pauses, but only for a second. He reaches up and adjusts his glasses. His voice stays calm. “Excuse me?”

Stan levers himself up to his bottom, keeping his gaze fixed on the bedspread. “I can’t keep doing this, Fiddleford,” he admitted. “Not like this.”

It’s like a switch was flipped.

Fiddleford went to his feet, angrily snatching tissues from the box on the side table. “ _Fine_ ,” he snaps, wiping away the mess of his own release from his midriff. He tosses the tissues towards a nearby wastebasket, not even caring when he missed. “Your loss.”

Stan watches with a frown. “No, not like-- I don’t wan’a  _leave_  you,” The younger man tells. "There was somethin’… Somethin’  _wrong_  in what we just did,” Stanley insists. “I know you felt it.”

“I felt your dick in my ass,” Fiddleford retorts, unflinching in his crude, blunt delivery.

“ _Fidd_ , just…” Tension spread through his limbs. “C’mon, don’t be like that--”

He’s tugging up his slacks, keeping his stare fixed somewhere to the middle-left of Stan’s earnest gaze. “Maybe you should go, Stanley.”

“I’m not, I  _know_  this,” Stanley stood from the bed, taking an involuntary step forward as panic crept into the spaces where smitten effervescence had reigned since July. “ _Fiddleford_ \--”

“Maybe you shouldn’t come back.”

The bellow tears out of him like thunder.  _“Damn it, Fiddleford-- I love you!”_

If time had stopped, that would have been easier.

Stanley’s shaking a little. Fine, trembling shakes that are almost unnoticeable by his hammering heart, and heavy breathing. The admission makes him feel naked, instead of simply being naked.

And it's the dark, unreadable look in his lover’s eyes that makes him feel vulnerable.

“I love you,” he repeated, nervously biting his lip. “I can’t help it-- I’ve fallen in love with you, and… A-and I  _know_  you love me, too.”

“…No.”

The word is  _cold_.

Fiddleford’s expression has shuttered, and his lips have thinned. Stanley was starting to hate that expression more than anything else.

“That’s fucking stupid,” Fiddleford told. “I don’t love you.”

Stanley’s gut feels splashed with ice-water, but he stubbornly shook his head.

“That’s  _crap_. Admit it!”

“No!  _Fuck you!”_  A bright, panicked light illuminates the engineer’s eyes, reckless in its obvious terror.

“What are you afraid of?!” Stanley shouts. “I know you feel the same--  _Just say it!”_

“Fuck off! I’m not sayin’ shit for you!”

It was  _fear_ , he could see it now-- Fiddleford was irrevocably, recklessly afraid.

But, he couldn’t quit. Not now. Not with that much  _honesty_  showing on Fiddleford’s face, whether the man realized it or not.

Stanley had to hear it.

He had to  _know_.

“Admit that you love me.” He walks towards Fiddleford, feeling like a child again; almost too pants-wettingly scared to face down a bully on the playground.

Fiddleford had begun to back away from him, into the middle of the room-- He’d have to round the long arm of his desk if he wanted to back any farther. The smaller man stares at Stan’s approach like a creature cornered.

He’s close enough to touch.

“You have to, Fiddleford. Admit it.  _Admit it.”_  He can see his reflection in front of that wide, awful, blue-eyed stare. “I  _know_  you lo--”

The slap rings loud; a solid, meat-hitting-meat kind of sound.

Fiddleford’s face feels just as stunned as the rest of him. He didn’t even  _think_  to do that.

Stanley’s head had moved with the motion, and all Fiddleford can see is his bewildered profile for long, tense moments.

The eventual, slow turning of the bartender’s face shows Fiddleford a look of speechless, anguished--

\--betrayal.

“… _God_.”

The word leaves his mouth much like his hand had moved; without thought.

Something appalling, and as familiar as the nose on his face bubbles up in the space between Fiddleford and the other man. He lunges for it on instinct; brings it inside, and hides behind its fury.

“Way to go, Stanley,” He hears his mouth say. “Now you’ve  _ruined_  it.”

The betrayal deepens into confused hurt, but Fiddleford was just getting started.

“You just had to feel like you were  _special_ , didn’t you? Just  _haaad’ta_  feel like you needed love to enjoy this.” The scoff that leaves his throat is as rude and as hateful as the one he used to hear from his mother. “Couldn’t stay happy with the orgasms, or gettin’ someone to touch your pecker whenever,  _ohhh_  no. You had to fall in loooove. God.  _God_. You fuckin’ moron. How  _old_  are you?”

“Fiddleford… shit,” Stan attempts, working his jaw even as distress monopolized his handsome features. “This, this isn’t  _like_  you; you… You’re not--”

“What did’ja expect, sunshine?” Fiddleford spat.

_‘Hellfire, hellfire, hellfire. Nothing but hellfire.’_

“That I’d leave all I’d worked for t’ be with you?  _You??”_  He snorted. “Your dick ain’t  _that_  great, Stan. I’ve had  _better_ , I’ve had men who knew what the hell they was  _doin’_. You want me to  _prove it--?”_

The look in the brunet's eyes was verging on broken.

Stan’s voice is tiny, and hoarse. “No.”

The sound hits his ears like a knife in the gut.

But Fiddleford’s mouth couldn’t stop. Like a ghost had possessed his tongue--  _he couldn’t stop._

“Because, I could get anyone I wanted. Right now.  _Anyone_. I can call that fuckin’ phone right the hell now, and get ten  _just like you_. You know this-- You knew this, didn’t you? Didn’t you? You  _knew_  I could have anyone on the damned planet, the way I got the world at my feet, and I still wasted my time on  _you_.”

If he stopped, Fiddleford would risk apologizing. He’d risk damning himself. He would risk pulling apart his ribs like wicker and showing his heart to the sun, to the light he knew he didn’t deserve-- to the shine of this kind creature a messed-up monster like himself should have never had the chance to touch in the first place.

“What? Did’ja think I was gon’a marry you?” Venom. Nothing but venom, now. “Set you up in  _my_  house, on  _my_  dollar? You thought you was  _special_ , or somethin’?  _You’re just a piece of ass, Stanley Pines_. You’re moron kike trash-- all you know how’ta do is pour beer and break the law. What could you offer me, huh?”

He’d risk getting into this  _emotional mess_  all over again, and he  _knew_ \-- like a snake knows a mongoose --that the second time around, he’d never be able to crawl back out.

“What the  _fuck_  did you think you brought to my table that I ain’t already tossed to the damned side more times than I could count?”

He had to ruin it. He had to ruin it now,  _right now_.

_He had to destroy him with words before he had a chance to destroy him with his life._

“ _Christ_ , I should have seen the signs. In fact, I shouldn’t’ve even tried. But, I saw you in that bar and I thought,  _‘Hey, I’ll treat myself; I’ll take pity on the virgin.’_ Dumbest mistake of my life.”

He forces himself to look at Stanley:

Agony. Raw, unadulterated agony sits in that boy’s expression-- and he put it there.

Fiddleford forces himself to remember what heartbreak looked like when worn on someone else’s face.

“ _Jesus_. You gon’a  _cry?”_   Fiddleford spiked an eyebrow. “And here I thought I was the real fag. God, you’re  _pathetic_.” He turned away, flapping a contemptuous hand over where Stanley’s face had crumpled, and his eyes had gone wet.

Maybe, if he remembered that expression, if he kept this bruise pressed, he’d stop next time.

Maybe he’d save some other poor fucker from eating his poison.

“Get dressed, for Pete’s sakes.” The engineer ordered, his voice a flat dismissal. “And then gidda _fuck_  out’a my house. Go on,  _git_.”

Stanley dresses in silence, and he leaves with a quiet, nearly noiseless pull on the bedroom door.

 

. . .

 

That night, Fiddleford hurls his nightstand through his window, and doesn’t sleep.

 

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS IS UNBETA'D  
> I HAVEN'T SLEPT IN TWO DAYS
> 
> Also, quick heads up--  
> 1\. Forgive me. I can hear everyone now. Please forgive me.  
> 2\. But, even if you don't: damn it, you got'a _trust me._


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, kids-- Here it is. 
> 
> Never, ever let it be said that I am not benevolent, or am I untrustworthy, 'cause I _know_ for damn sure that I just fuckin' delivered.
> 
> This thing opens up like gangbusters because it's picking up immediately where the last left off.
> 
> Fortune favours the brave, sweet babies.  
> See y'all at the bottom!

Stanford’s on the front porch, halfway through an obvious smoke break. There are shadows around his eyes not just from the gloom of poor evening light, and they allude to a week of way too little sleep and way too much coffee.

Stanley shoulders his knapsack a bit higher, keeping a firm bite on the inside of his lower lip as he gets closer to the soft orange glow of the porchlight.

“You’re back early,” Ford comments, tapping ash off of his cigarette. “I didn’t expect you until tomorrow, at least--”

Lee climbs the steps with robotic detachment, plunking his feet in a mechanical, mindless plod that takes him past his brother and through the front door. He doesn’t react to Stanford’s words at all.

The brief sight of his twin’s passing expression makes something like quiet panic yank in the researcher’s gut.

“…Lee?”

Ford’s setting down the ashtray and stubbing out his smoke with a distracted, autopilot tap as he gauges the silence of the front room. Lee must have already moved further inside.

He’s following in a matter of seconds, pushing through the piece of hinged plywood serving as door to the den, and he almost trips over his feet when he stops short on the rug.

“…Oh, no.”

Stanley’s crammed as much of himself as he can curl into a fetal ball against the distant armrest of the couch; his black leather jacket pulled off and draped over his face and arms.

Stanford blows out a breath as recognition tamps down the frantic caretaker’s worry that had been building in his stomach. “Lee?”

“Stanley’s not here,” comes the muffled, sniffling reply. “He’s in Jacket Town now.”

“Oh boy,” Stanford sighs.

_‘Jacket Town.’_

Lee hadn’t done this for a couple of years. Stanford had been secretly hoping that the specialized stimming behavior had been gone for good.  _He_  didn’t really mind it, honestly, but--

Ford sits down on the edge of the cushion beside his brother, letting out another breath through his nose.

…But he was still worried about what  _other people_  would think if they knew Stanley (scrappy, foul-mouthed, joke-cracking Stanley) sometimes turned into… this.

 _‘Yeah, that’s a **much better**  explanation, Stan,’_ the brunet chided to himself.  _‘That doesn’t make you sound like an asshole at **all**.’_

The researcher rests a tentative, yet steady hand on the highest of the lumps covered by the jacket, the one he knew was Stanley’s head. “Stanley, can you come out of Jacket Town?” Stanford tries, knowingly attempting to keep his tone calm, and dispassionate.

A shake of the head-lump.

“Please?”

“Goddamnit, I  _need_  a minute,” Stanley bites out, his deep voice sounding kind of warped.

Now Stanford  _knew_  he was crying. A thrum of tension leaps in his ribs with the thought, and all desires to take this slow and to offer breathing room are crushed under the renewed weight of his worry.

“ _Stanley_.” Stanford pries a little hole between the end folds of the leather jacket; not seeing his twin clearly, but doing enough to let Lee know he was starting to get serious. Ford had never violated the boundary of Jacket Town unless he’d thought Stanley was really in trouble, and needed him. “You need to talk to me.  _C’mon_.” He pauses to watch his brother’s continued immobility, before resting his hands on the sloped areas he knew covered the boxer’s shoulders. “Lee, it’s always worse inside your head,” Stanford reminds, “you know this. If you just go ahead and spit it out, even if it’s just in pieces, you know you’ll eventually land on something that makes sense.”

A sniffle; a subtle shifting of Lee’s sneakers on the couch. Enough to indicate the man was at least  _listening_.

More than enough.

Ford squeezes around his twin’s shoulders before pulling back, into his own space. “Come on…”

There’s a second of stillness. Then, like a hesitant concession, Stanley slowly pulls down his jacket, exposing his head; just slightly shamefaced.

Stanford’s heart gives a lurch.

_‘Oh no.’_

He looks  _awful_. The slim meat of his cheeks are red and splotched, and his eyes-- behind smudged glasses --are rimmed a painful pink, and look a little bloodshot. Tear tracks streak his stubbly, unwashed face. One of his hands comes up and combs back self-consciously through his short hair, and Stanford can tell he’s in need of a shower.

There’s also the slightly acrid smell of old sweat, and that awful muskiness of sex Stanford  _knows_  Lee didn’t cultivate on his own.

“Stan…”

The way Ford says his name makes Stanley’s chest hurt worse.

“Bro, what happened?”

Time hangs smothering and fat as Stanford waits, trying to remember not to hold his breath. Something about the distressed edge in his brother’s expression makes the researcher a strange kind of hesitant. The look reminds Stanford of a quiet, contained implosion.

_‘This could take a while.’_

The boxer fixes a vacant, internalized kind of stare at a distant point on the carpet. He opens his mouth a couple of times, but it’s not until another minute later that he actually manages making sound. “…Fiddleford. He--” Lee stops, gathers himself again. The tiny amount of collection he’d built up within just to come out of Jacket Town had instantly burned off when he’d started speaking words.

Ford just waits.

Stanley licks his lips. “…He dumped me.”

Stanford can’t help the puzzled frown. “Did you guys have your first fight, or something?” He asks. His mind jumps ahead: “Can you make up? Maybe things are just heavy right now, and later--”

 _“IT’S OVER,”_ Stanley cuts in with a yell. His eyes are welling up again, and his fingers are curling trembling fists into his jacket. “It’s _over_. He-- He--” Lee seems to shrink in on himself, shoulders bunching up around his ears as his chin tucks low, quivering with tension. “I’m s-so s-s- _stupid_ , I’m so  _stupid_ …”

The  _pain_  on his brother’s face inspires a sympathetic echo of aching within Stanford, and on reflex, the researcher stretches out a hand to start to rub a soothing circuit across Lee’s upper back. “Stanley,  _it’s okay_ ,” Ford offers, “it’s okay-- Tell me what happened.”

 _“He said he never loved me!”_  The words come out loud from his mouth on the crest of the ugly, tell-tale sound of imminent tears. “He, he t-told m-me I was just, just a piece of-- of  _ass_ , a-and it was my  _f-fault_  for getting attached!” Lee’s breaths start getting shallower. _Hyperventilation_. “Because, I just… I just, I just, I wanted him to, to, to--”

“ _Okay_ , hold on, hold on--” Stanford hurriedly swings to his feet and goes into the nearby kitchen, grabbing up a soft rag from the drawer by the sink. Thankfully, the giant boiler in the basement kept the wait for hot water down to only a scattered series of seconds. He wets the rag when the tap rattles out the last of the cold water sitting in the pipes, and wrings out the excess until it’s only damp, carrying the steaming washcloth to the living room in cupped hands.

He takes one of Stanley’s hands and puts the cloth in his grip, pulling his brother’s glasses down and off once his palms are free. “Here, wipe your face,” Ford gently, yet firmly, orders. “Deep breaths--  _thaaat’s_  it. In through your nose, out through your mouth…”

Stanley’s body instinctively catches on, moving his hands to wipe his eyes and then press his face into the rag, breathing deeply through the steaming fabric for long moments.

He doesn’t pull the cloth away from his face until its gone cold.

In a small, empty voice, Stanley says: “...I just wanted him to, t-to say he loved me, too.”

The rag is starting to get twisted in his fingers, fidgety energy pulling at the loose pills of cotton along its edges.

“What did he do, Stan?” Ford asks the question in a hushed, encouraging tone, watching his brother.

“We f-fu-- We had sex,” Stanley tells, timbre staying low and even to avoid the cracking he knew he couldn’t stop. “And, and the whole time, he was s-sayin’, sayin’ I was  _only special_  ‘cause  _he_  wanted me, he, he could get  _a-another_ _me_  at any time--” The words grow hooked, and they catch in his throat. “I just wanted him to admit it, too. I know-- Ford, I  _know_  he has to, I-I’m not crazy, I felt it!”

For a moment, Stan feels like he’s back in Fiddleford’s bedroom, slowly crossing the floor as he stares at the engineer; he feels so scared, yet  _so sure_  about how he felt that the memory of that sudden, unexpected strike turns like a sore ache within his chest.

“I said I loved him. And, a-and said I knew he felt the sa-- the same. But, he got… he got  _mad_ , Ford.” Stanley’s mouth is an honest, tight-lipped frown of confused trust. “He got  _so mad_.”

“Oh,  _Stanley_.” Stanford pets a large hand over the greasy crown of his twin’s head, wishing he could do more than just sympathize. He angles his brother over until Lee is leaning against him, his head pillowed on Stanford’s wide shoulder. God, McGucket was a  _dick_. He’d had no idea. “I am so, so sorry.”  
  
Lee sniffs. Quietly, and in a tiny voice, he adds: “He slapped me.”

Ford’s hand stops, and a lead-like weight drops into his stomach.

“…He did  _what?”_

“Because I wouldn’t leave it alone,” Lee elaborates. “He told me to get out, but I-- I wouldn’t leave. I kept, I kept pushing, I kept pushin’‘cause I wanted him to say it, too, s-say it was more than sex, say he--” Here, he suddenly goes quiet. His lower lip curls a bit. “…I just wanted him to say he loved me, too. I wasn’t askin’ him to marry me. I just wanted him to admit it.”

“…But, I’m the  _fuckin’ moron_  who got  _attached_.” The sudden, vicious spit of disgusted humiliation which bursts out of Lee takes Stanford back for a moment. He looks down, watches his twin’s dismal expression crumple back into watery hopelessness. “An’ I  _blew_ it.”

The researcher’s other palm came up and scrubbed his face, a deep sigh pulling from his lungs. “Did he slap you with that metal hand?” He asks. McGucket was a short, wiry little man, and if Stanley needed to, Stanford knew there wouldn’t even be a challenge.  _‘But that prosthesis…’_

Lee shakes his head. “No. It was his normal hand.” A breathy, weak huff of laughter leaves his mouth. “Like that’s any  _better_ , though.”

Ford snorts his own version of the sound, making a small quirking-up at a corner of his mouth. “Yeah, I guess not,” he concedes.

Silence spreads through the room, interrupted only by Lee’s soft, nose-clearing sniffles.

Stanford heaves a sigh. “C’mon, Stan.” He pulls his arm from around his twin, climbing to stand when Lee rights himself on the couch. “Let’s get you a shower, and into bed. I think you deserve a day or two off.”

His brother lets his jacket slip from his lap to puddle on the floor, and he follows Lee in such a docile kind of way that the researcher is genuinely startled by the quick pulse of rage that suddenly jerks at his chest.

As they’re climbing the stairs to Stanley’s bedroom, Stanford asks: “Y’want me to call Dan for you?”

“Ain’t got his house number,” his twin mumbles, pushing open the door to his room.

The despondent expression on his twin’s face is both heart-breaking and infuriating.

Stanley looks  _defeated_.

 

. . .

Something ugly is vomiting up a terrible self-loathing within Stanford’s gut.  _You did this,_ it accuses, _You let this happen to him._

Stanford grits his teeth, stomping down the last few stairs; finally allowing himself to really feel his anger now that Lee was safely out of earshot.

It’s not until he’s down in the basement, standing in the middle of the room with no real purpose, does he feel something snap.

The table knocks across the room with a deafening clatter, papers and pens flying like leaves and books tumbling into a scattered, thumping mess as Stanford lets out this horrible kind of snarl with the shove.

_‘I did this.’_

He sank to his knees. Guilt built a punishing nausea inside his throat; the weight of it almost had him forgetting how to breathe as his shaking hands snake into his hair.

_‘I pushed him. I said it would be okay. I pushed him.’_

Everything goes tight and awful for a long, hateful moment inside Stanford’s skin.

_‘I promised him, I promised him everything would be okay out here, I promised him all he needed to do was branch out, take a chance…’_

He wants to die, he wants to make Stanley smile, he wants to take away his twin’s pain, he wants to go back in time and never say what he did, he wants to--

The researcher pulls back and stares at his hands; those meaty, six-fingered monstrosities.

Anger burns inside of him; a hot, vengeful anger-- lava-like and terrible, the kind of solid, pouring fury that births poor judgment and bad decisions.

His hands curl into fists.

_‘I’m going to fucking kill that sonofabitch.’_

 

. . .

The door is hauled open and smacks against the concrete of the wall outside with a resounding  _BANG_. The brass bell hanging on a hook at the top jingles madly against itself as the bounce of the portal rattles in its hinges.

“Whoa!” The guy behind the bar yells out. “Easy on the merchandise, dude!”

But Stanford doesn’t hear him. He prowls in past the doorway, adjusting the set of his glasses as his eyes do a quick flicker over the patrons inside.

The sight of that pale, weak-chinned profile drinking so _fucking calm_  and  _easy_  down at the far end of the bartop is like snatching off the lid on Stanford’s tense, pressurized anger, and the researcher damn near explodes with fury.

Rage carries him on purposeful, long-legged strides towards McGucket’s barstool and shouts a loud clap of a “ _HEY_ ” from his mouth.

The moment that McGucket turns his head is the moment Stanford pulls back a fist and slings it into his jaw, connecting with a meaty right hook that sends the smaller man flying backwards off of his seat and landing in a hard flop on the stone floor. The connection makes air rush out of McGucket’s lungs, and he’s coughing as Stanford steps forward and reaches down to yank him bodily upwards, angry hands curled into the skinny man’s suit jacket like a vise.

But before he can shift his grip and wrench his elbow back for another hit, there’s a strong jerk hooking into his collar and Stanford’s snatched backwards, effectively separating him from McGucket.

An absolutely massive ginger man--  _(‘Manly Dan.’)_  --has his trashcan lid-sized right hand clenched around the top of Stanford’s jacket, and his left hand engulfing one of McGucket’s slim, pinstriped upper arms as he holds them apart and an inch or so above the floor.

“Fuckin’  _enough_ ,” Dan roars, his baritone sandpaper-rough with annoyance. “No fightin’ in this bar! That crap breaks furniture! D’ya have  _any_ idea what goes into replacing wood like this?!”

Dan releases both men with a sudden shoving flourish, and the return to holding himself up is mildly jarring as Stanford’s posture settles his weight back into the cradle of his shoes.

Across from him, the smaller scientist wavers in a similar way, his patent-leathered feet shuffling as he gets his bearings again. There’s a muffled curse slipping from his lips as Stanford watches that damned metal hand come up and probe tenderly at his bruising cheek.

A flash of righteous pride flares under his skin, but then Dan is smacking the flats of one of his hand’s large, folded knuckles like a hammer against Stanford’s shoulder.

The researcher turns his face, catching the ginger’s dark expression.

“Take that shit out back,” Manly Dan orders, jerking a salami-sized thumb back over one of his humongous shoulders, and padding the unspoken threat with a mean glower shot at the both of them.

The fire door leading into the alley is significantly heavier and regulated by a piston joint, so Stanford can’t slam through it like he did to the one up front.

But he still takes wide steps, pacing out and across the pavement as McGucket follows him onto the street.

The little man is as squared up as he apparently can get, and he is shamelessly glaring at Stanford. “Who the fuck are you?!” He demands.

“You  _motherfucker_ ,” Stanford growls. He stalks back towards the door and has a brawny, six-fingered paw stabbing an angry finger into the engineer’s face as he spits: “You self-centered  _prick_. I ought’a break you right now.  _You fucking broke my brother’s heart.”_

Something makes a quiet, eye-opening little click inside Fiddleford’s head.

He can recognize similarities, now-- The same eye-color, hair-color, the same set of the jaw, that same handsome, Semitic curve of the nose.

…This was Stanley’s  _twin_.

_‘Oh, hell.’_

“What the fuck do you want, Tiny?” The engineer demands, pressing his fingers back to his jaw as he works his chin open and closed, testing the tenderness.

“I want to know what the  _fuck_  your problem is,” Stanford spat. The expression on his face is  _ugly_. “I want to know where you get off stringin’ along my brother and then fuckin’ throwing him out like he’s  _nothing_.”

“… _Well_ , the answer’s in the question, genius,” Fiddleford drawls, deliberately patronizing. “Because he was tryna make somethin’  _out of_ nothing, and he shat the bed. So I ended it.  _Done_. Now, will you fuck off?”

The researcher takes a half step back and his eyes rove sightlessly over the brickwork, incredulous. “Fuckin’ Moses,” he barks, a dumbfounded laugh pushing his words. “You’re incredible. You don’t feel anything at all, do you?” Stanford swings his arms out with the question. “You are  _exactly_  how everyone says you are. Stanley is  _broken_ , because of you. You messed him up, McGucket, and you don’t feel  _anything_  about it?”  
  
That nasty clench is clamping back inside his middle at the mere thought of the bartender, but avoidant terror takes Fiddleford’s tongue and fills his chest with enough hot, self-righteous anger to match Stanford’s own.

“Oh, how  _awful_ ,” Fiddleford hears his mouth say. “I broke somethin’ that was already broke. What a _traaagedy_.”

Furious offense settles heavily into the younger man’s rugged features. “You sick sonofabi--”

“Why the shit are you even here, big guy?” Fiddleford asks, timbre vaulting loud and taunting as he feels himself slip back into that defensive patter of venom. “What? Is he too much of a fuckin’  _baby_  to handle this himself? He had to get his mutant hippopotamus of a brother t’ come for me? I should have  _realized_  all the times I shoved him down and took what I wanted that Stanley Pines was  _nothin’ more than a big, dumb--”_

The fist swings into his nose like a wrecking ball, connecting with an awful sound of breaking bone and a winded exhalation of surprise from Fiddleford’s mouth as he goes careening backwards, stumbling awkwardly for a few, slipping steps, until he lands hard on his back.

He rolls stiffly over onto his side and immediately tries to touch his face, delicately tapping the pads of his fingers along his bones to feel for all of the damage. Along with his cheekbone, his nose is definitely broken. A tinkling sound hits the asphalt by his cheek, and everything out of his left eye suddenly seems blurred--  _great_ , his glasses are broken, too.  _‘Goddamnit.’_

Fiddleford coughs, splutters, sending flecks of blood splattering into the smeared puddle that was starting to gather beneath his head. Absently, he swipes at the hot streak he can feel running down the side of his cheek, wiping his fingertips on the pavement as he struggles for a clear breath.

But, despite the blood and the head-splitting pain, fury boosts him enough to snarl out a thick: _“Fuck you!”_  
  
When Stanford steps closer, the engineer’s hindbrain makes a panicked shout to the rest of him, and one of Fiddleford’s hands suddenly darts out to pick up a stray brick from the ground by his head and slamming it into Stanford’s left knee when he’s close enough.

The taller scientist howls and stumbles back, but he’s distracted by the pain for only a couple of seconds before he immediately brings his left boot around in a swinging arc to kick mercilessly at McGucket, burrowing a fast, hard couple of blows into the downed man’s gut that knock the wind back out of him.  
  
Fiddleford’s curled small and gasping, breathing in wet coughs through his mouth.

Stanford leans a hand out to brace his posture on the nearby wall as he catches his breath, chest heaving.

But he eventually bends at the waist, his feet planted far enough apart so that he can rumble into McGucket’s ear: “I don’t care who you are, how much money you’ve got, or where you get your nerve to say shit like this-- Stanley is one of the best people on the planet, and you fucking wasted your chance to keep him. You stupid asshole.”

He stretches upright again, hissing as his knee gives a painful bend, and adjusts the wooly collar of his leather jacket with a grunt, shaking out his bruised fingers when he steps back. “Find somewhere else to drink,” he commands. “If you have any decency inside you, McGucket, you’ll let him keep this one thing.”

Before Stanford limps through the door, he bites out: “I hope you die alone.”

Fiddleford groans into his hands. 

 

. . .

When the service door was unceremoniously pushed open, Victoria looked up from her magazine.

“… _Jesus_ ,” she breathed. “What the hell happened to you?”

Fiddleford pulled down his crumpled tie and snarled (as best he could), “ _Stanford Pines_  happened to me.”

His glasses were bent, with one of the lenses busted, and dried blood flaked gruesome, clotted smears below his nose, flecking along to the dark bruising at his jaw. He’d managed to push the bone back into alignment while sitting in the car, but not before blood had splashed down from the break, ruining his shirt.

Vicky watched her husband kick the door back to close and then stomp across the tile, taking a seat on the little couch behind where she was perched at the island counter. “Wait, ‘Stanford’?” she asks. “I thought his name was ‘Stanley’.”

Fidd pulls back on the bloodstained tie pressed up to his nose, grimacing at the dark maroon bleeding across the patterned silk. “ _Twin_ ,” he elaborates. “There are  _two_  of them.”

As if reading Vicky’s mind, Fiddleford shot her a withering glare over the wadded cloth in his grip. “You stupid woman,” came his reproachful grumble. “Don’t even suggest it. Th’ain’t even  _identical_.”

He stretched his neck until his head was pillowed on the thin, upright back cushion of the couch, immediately wincing when the new angle didn’t help.  _Jesus_ , his head was  _pounding_.

He turned his face and frowned out at the busy kitchen.

 _“…Someone better get me some fuckin’ painkillers or I’m firin’ everybody in this damn room!”_  Fiddleford suddenly yelled. The help instantly stopped what they were doing and stared over at the engineer, who glared hatefully at everyone in sight. “I mean,  _christ_ ,” he gestures at himself with his free hand. “I’m  _bleedin’_  over here, y’all saw me come in-- the fuck am I payin’ you bastards for?!”

Vicky snagged the elbow of a nearby, terrified maid, and said: “Just stuff a baggie with ice, and please go get the diva a clean towel and some aspirin.  _Nobody’s getting fired,”_ she announced to the room. The woman scurried off, and the kitchen seemed to gradually return to its prior busyness.

The blonde scooted around in her seat until she was facing Fiddleford. “I guess Stanford Pines is a boxer like his brother? Judging by the--” She flickered a finger towards the general direction of Fidd’s face. “-- _oh so fashionable_  black-and-blue garage doors your eyes are now sportin’, I mean.”

“No,” came the sullen reply. “He’s just a twelve-fingered- _freak_  with a shitload’a extra mass to sling around.” Fiddleford dropped the bloody tie onto the seat beside him. “Even untrained apes can still cause a lot’a damage when there’s enough hate propellin’ ‘em, Victoria.”

“…Twelve fingers?” Vicky looked off to the middle-distance as her mind curled inward with thought. “Like, six on  _each hand?”_

When there’s a curious little smile tilting up at her lips, Fiddleford shoots his wife a downright offended frown. “…Oh,  _god_ ,” he spits, loud and revolted. “Here I am,  _in_ _pain_ , and you’re imaginin’ shovin’ some polydactylic hippo’s hands down your pants.”

Victoria brushes off his annoyed judgment with a bounce of her shoulders and a toss of her hair. “Shame is for suckers, dear.”

The same maid from before returns to the kitchen, and she delivers a zipped bag of icecubes and a tray bearing a small stack of wet wipes, and a few white tablets. Fiddleford, thankfully, does not translate his foul mood onto the woman, and merely accepts the medicine with a polite kind of silence.

Vicky watches as the engineer pulls off his ruined glasses and starts to clean his face, tossing back the handful of aspirin in one dry, grimacing swallow.

“…You know, Fiddles--”

A glare. “Don’t--”

“--I know _: ‘Don’t call me that’,”_  she wiggled her head as she recited the line. “But, you do realize you kind’a deserve this?”

Fiddleford’s motion seems to slow, but he doesn’t look up at her eyes. “…Fuckin’ preposterous,” he mumbled, gathering up the dirty wipes to heap them onto the tray.

A throaty, bovine sigh groans out of the blonde’s mouth as she tips her chin up to the ceiling. “Oh my  _goooddd_ ,” she complains. “You are pouting like a  _child_.”

“Damn gorilla broke my nose, Victoria!” Fidd countered.

Vicky threw her hands into the air above her lap. “Well, a damned emotionally-stunted  _weasel_  broke his brother’s heart! I’d bust up your snide little mug,  _too_ , if I were him!”

The churlish, stubborn glower he’s got fixed onto the tile makes Fiddleford look pitiful, and something like pathetic. It wasn’t often that someone got to haul off and whack him one, though heaven knew he needed it, and Victoria knew the opportunity to harp on the significance of the situation probably wouldn’t come around again, anytime soon.

“You know you deserved this, Fiddleford,” she says. “You didn’t just fuck up what you had with that boy-- you nuked the bed from friggin’ orbit. Now you have no choice but to live without.”

There’s a weak sniffle, and then he’s pressing another wipe to his nostrils. “…Shut up, Vicky.” The words are a nasally muffle.

With consummate, arrogant feline grace, Victoria swung her legs out from beneath her bottom and climbed to her feet, flapping her magazine into a clutch against her side as she swanned out of the kitchen. “I’m still right, though,” she breezed over her shoulder.

Fiddleford watched her go, feeling a pouty, chagrined kind of  _impressed_  color around the hollowness nursing in his middle.

Rude bitch had been around him for too long.

 

. .::. .

 

November had descended onto Gravity Falls with a freezing indifference, the kind of marrow-reaching cold that isolated a body as much as it numbed.  
  
Stanley, in a way, was glad for the weather. For the past two weeks, he’d been doing nothing but feeling, and his emotional reserves were almost thoroughly shot. Numbness, even if just from the cold, was a welcomed change.

Those first few days after--  _After_ , had run an unprecedented gamut on the boxer’s interior landscape. Stanford had put a complete stopper on the larger, more consuming aspects of his research in favour of looking after his twin. Had Stan been any more like himself, he knows he would have tried to harangue his sibling and whine about the enforced, hand-holding care, but…

Well, he knew he kind of needed it, and it meant that at least  _somebody_  gave a shit about him.

_(Ford never protested when his brother crawled into bed beside him, seemingly understanding that the only thing keeping his twin from flying apart was the solid, warm hand rubbing over his curled back, and that the unspoken, unconditional acceptance offered when Lee inevitably broke down and cried like a child was valued more than the boxer’s own weight in gold.)_

His mind had gone loose within the shell of his body; aimless, disconnected, shrinking in on itself to avoid sensation. He didn’t recognize himself.

He didn’t really want to.

 

. .::. .

 

He’d been at the cabin for a solid six days when the landline had rung with a call from Dan.

 _“I figured something had happened, Pines.”_  The lumberjack’s gruff baritone had been weirdly soft over the electric projection of the telephone’s speaker.  _“Don’t worry. I won’t count this week. But, if you don’t show up for work for next Friday’s rush, I’m promotin’ Valentino as head bartender, and I’m dockin’ your pay.”_

Stanley had scrubbed a hand over his cheek as he listened, trying not to sigh into the phone. “Yeah, I get that,” he’d agreed.

_“Good. And, tell that froggy bastard of a brother you got that if he comes in and tries to bust up my customers again, I’ll chop off his extra fingers.”_

Stan had been too stunned to properly end the conversation, and had hung the receiver on its mount with a blank, shuttered expression turned to his brother.

Stanford had been holding up the far wall, monitoring his twin’s mood.

“…Dan says you’re not allowed to fight people in his bar anymore,” the boxer had slowly stated.

He’s suddenly remembering watching his brother hobble and lean on the walls, and drag himself up the stairs with a heavy grip on the banister for the past few days. When Stanley had felt curious, and stable enough to question the strange, eightball-topped cane his brother had carried, his twin offhandedly mentioned he’d found it in the attic, and  _“Only thought it was neat.”_  

The longer he'd stared at Stanford, the more questions that had unfurled.

But the look on Ford’s face had said enough, and Stanley hadn’t even had the energy to challenge it.

 

. . .

The second week of November ended with Cheryl and the kids driving up for a long holiday. Though he adored his niece and nephew, their bouncy energy and blunt, boundless curiosity for things like  _“Why ain’t Uncle Lee smilin’?”_  made Stanley decide he really needed to go back to work.

Whether from Dan’s intimidating influence or from their own oblivious inattentions, the regulars didn’t bat an eye when Stan showed up that Thursday afternoon and started pulling drafts like his absence hadn’t even happened.

And as he would work, sometimes, the memory of his eager high-hopes from June would return in an echo and taunt Stanley; ringing a cruel parody of how he’d assured Stanford  _“Everything will be okay.”_

The hateful self-loathing he would feel in those moments would almost cripple him with shame. All he wanted to do was hide.

Stanley had been thinking about quitting.  
But he knew he needed the distraction.

He could only stand for so much longer the sad, cautious gaze his twin kept casting onto him when Ford didn’t think Stan was paying attention. (And the sympathetic, maternal energy coming off of Cheryl was its own breed of suffocating.)

If anything, the uncomplicated routine of working behind the bar provided his waking self with a much-needed absorption while the rest of his burned-out undersense kept itself in a coiled, miserable brood, and quietly licked its wounds.

“Hey, can I get a rootbeer?”

“If it doesn’t make you wobble,” Stanley deadpanned, “we don’t serve it. Sorry.”

The gnome jumped down from the stool with a huff, and Stan continued wiping sweat rings from the bartop. The night had passed by in a blur; Stanley hadn’t even noticed when Valentino had come in. He hadn’t even noticed when the clock had ticked past midnight.

A quick set of initials were scratched onto his timecard, his apron was dropped behind the bar, and then Stan was zipping himself into his jacket. He pushed through the rear exit with his butt, his hands already balled up inside his coat pockets in anticipation of the outside cold.

But there was a truck blocking in his bike.

In the glow of the weak yellow security light that burned above the dumpster, Stan could make out the shape of Dan Corduroy standing at the lowered tailgate of his Dodge, talking as animatedly and as brightly as Stanley had ever seen him be. The lumberjack was pulling down broken liquor jugs from the recycling pile in the truckbed.

“Oh yeah, man, I can definitely use these.”

A tall woman was taking the jugs when Dan passed them over, and she was chunking them into the back of her own truck. “I’ll show these to the foreman when I get in tomorrow, Dan; dude’ll be thrilled.”

“I’m glad, Rainey,” Dan rumbled.

Stan’s shoe crunched on ice, making the lumberjack look up. “Pines!” He smiled. The woman turned her head to see him, too.

Stanley stared.

A massive, gloved hand was waved at the bartender to come closer. “Pines,” Dan begins, “this is--”

“Lorraine Fay,” The woman announces, stepping forward and sticking out one of her plaid mittens for Stanley to shake. She has long, auburn hair hanging out of a knit cap, and a face full of freckles. “It’s a real pleasure. I’ve been told about you, man! Stanley Pines, right? You’re good people. Anyone who can handle ol’ Corduroy is fine by me.”

Her words curl around within her voice in an arching, familiar way, and the sound of them makes an automatic stab of grief drive in past Stan’s ribs.

But he makes a heavy swallow and steps up to meet the woman’s handshake, inwardly ignoring the thrum of melancholy sitting between his lungs. “Yeah, that’s me. You guys old friends, or somethin’?” Stan asks.

“Yeah, me and Dan are  _tight_ ,” Lorraine admits, punching a fist into one of Dan’s treetrunk-sized biceps; earning a delighted laugh from the man.

The fascinated frown that curved at Stanley’s brow as he watched the exchange is an interesting distraction, and he files away Dan’s incongruous behavior to think about later.

The brunet pulled out a hand to adjust his glasses before pointing a finger at the cramped space beyond Lorraine’s little pickup. “You, uh. You kind’a blocked me in, there,” he says.

Both redheads glance over at the place in question, and an apologetic curse slips out of Lorraine’s mouth. “Shit, my bad, dude,” she offers, pulling off one of her mittens to fish out a keyring from her pants. “Let me move this sucker real quick for you, okay?”

When she turns around to haul open her driver’s side door, the light hits the back of her windbreaker, and Stanley catches sight of the neat embroidery arcing around a familiar logo in the middle:

**_MCGUCKET LABORATORIES  
CONSTRUCTION  & DEVELOPMENT DIVISION_ **

Lorraine drives her truck forward to the mouth of the alley as Stan feels his heart hammer.

He’s not sure why he’s so surprised-- " _MGL_ " was plastered on damn near everything in this town; it only made sense for MGL to employ over half of the locals.

Maybe he just wasn’t expecting to have it shoved in his face so… soon.

The ginger is already no more than a few feet away again, and the bartender uses her approach as an excuse to ignore what was trying to go on in his belly.

“You should be able to get out no problem, now,” Lorraine declares, standing at an angle from both men to even out their little circle. She sends a nod over to the now exposed Triumph. “Nice bike, by the way.”

Stanley swallows. “Thanks. You, um…” He stops, licks his lips. The wetness immediately chills the chapped skin, and Stan exhales puffs of warm air at the sensation. Reflexively, he pulls his other hand out of his pocket to rub his palm over cold fingers. “You work for MGL?” He asked.

Dan shoots him a look far too layered for Stanley to peel and understand in such a short amount of time, and Lorraine gives an eyeroll. “Who  _don’t_  in this town?” She confirms.

Despite himself, Stanley snorts out a genuine laugh.

Lorraine grins, and her hands swing back in to the pockets of her windbreaker as she leans back onto the heels of her boots. “Yeah, I’m a contract metalworker,” she explains. “I was off doin’ a job in St Louis for a time, but my position workin’ offsite ‘round here for the HQ is where the real money’s at.”

“Well…” Stanley nods. “Good for you.”

“Wish I ain’t had to come back in this stupid-ass cold, though,” she adds.

“You used to live here,” Dan points out, his natural growl not as burred.

Lorraine gives him a playfully offended expression. “Dude, that only means I have the  _right_  to complain!”

Stan pulls out his own keys. “Well-- I’m gon’a go,” he said.

“Night, Pines,” Dan grunts.

“Yeah, night  _Piiines_ ,” Lorraine calls out, giggling when one of Dan’s hands come out to swat at her for the tease.

He cranks the engine on his bike with a smile, and waves at the redheads when he rolls past.

 

. . .

Lorraine Fay quickly became a fixture in The Gnarly Oak. The core regulars seemed to remember her, and her presence blended in seamlessly with the afternoon crowd that clustered around the bartop.

The ginger was laid-back and frank in personality, friendly to absolutely everyone, and whenever she opened her mouth, Stanley usually found himself laughing.

“But, like,” Lorraine stated, gesturing at Dan with her beer bottle, “If you get a band set up in here, I guarandamn _tee_  you’ll double your clientele.”

“Uh-huuuh,” The ginger rumbled as he poured bourbon for Toby, side-eyeing the woman with mock-suspicion.

Dan had been spending more time up around the front ever since Lorraine had been coming by the Oak after work.

“You know,” the woman continued, Stanley listening to the side as he wiped out clean steins, “offer a flat rate for a cover band to come in and croon on the weekends. Spice things up-- Get rid of that old stereo, and start courtin’ new people.”

“Get  _rid of the stereo?”_  Dan loudly parroted, his gravelly voice sounding gently affronted. “The fuck would I do that? You got a problem with my tapes? What’s wrong with my tunes?”

“Dude, your tunes are kind of…” She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling as her free hand made a flat, sideways gesture. “…Not exactly  _aesthetic_  for this crowd.”

“Too bad!” Dan snapped, and then, in a shout like dynamite going off:  _“EVERYONE KNOWS GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN, RAINEY.”_

Stanley and Lorraine laughed themselves into  _tears_.

 

. . .

There didn’t seem to be any malice in Lorraine, Stan thought. She was  _absurdly_  easy to talk to-- a lot like Ford, in some ways --and the bartender found himself drinking up the simple, casual socialization she offered like a man desperately parched.

It was no secret-- (well, not to Stanley, and he usually didn’t pick up on these kinds of things) --that Lorraine had a thing for Manly Dan, but, either the ginger giant was truly uninterested, or just shy; he didn’t seem to be trying to get anything going with her.

So when the woman would stick around the bar, chattering with Stanley all the way up until closing, Stan didn’t feel there was anything wrong in keeping her attention.

She was just so…  _friendly_. So calm, and so fucking  _mellow_  in her presence that it kind of made Stan’s head swim. There was nothing underneath those words, that smile; no dark, enchanting gulf he would get pulled into if he stood too close.

It was all so relaxed. And so--

\-- _Different_.

And when Lorraine had followed Stan out to his bike one evening, and even when she’d opened her mouth and had started talking about the kind of things that before would have made Stanley’s gut tie itself up in knots and blood rush to his cheeks, he’d still felt  _fine_.

Lorraine  _liked_  him. She was funny, unfussy, and cute.

Maybe she was just what he needed.

 

. .::. .

 

“Hey, man.”

Lorraine was leaning on the wall next to him behind the bar. They were passing a cigarette between themselves as Stan took his mandatory break.

He bounced on the balls of his feet for a moment as he exhaled a plume of warm air and smoke. “Hmm?”

The redhead took the cigarette and tapped off the ash. “You know I’m not in love with you, right?”

Stanley blinked, looking over with a slightly surprised expression. “…W-whoa, okay,” He began. “You don’t beat around the bush, huh?”

Lorraine rolled her eyes. “Sorry.” She took a drag for a moment, before cupping her elbow in her free hand as she gestured with the cigarette. She exhaled: “It’s just--” A shoulder bounce. “People are weird, man.  _Complex_. It’s easy to be  _friendly_  to all of ‘em, but it’s hard to get close to most of them ‘cause they’re all doin’ their own shit. You know?”

Stan rubbed at his arms. “…I think so,” he tried.

“It’s the closeness that makes shit worthwhile, in my opinion,” Lorraine continued, burning down the last of the cigarette and flicking the butt away towards the dumpster with a jittery sigh.

She shrugged. “I’unno. It’s hard findin’ someone you don’t have to feel…” Lorraine crossed her arms. “Like,  _really_  ‘Capital F’  _Feel_  for, but you still care for ‘em.”

The redhead turned until she was propped up on her left upper arm, and stared at Stanley. The bartender noticed how green her eyes seemed. “I like you,” Lorraine stated. “I like bein’ around you. I think that’s--” She crooked a corner of her lips into a kind of pinched frown. “--I think that’s special, in a way. You know?”

Stanley thought. “Yeah. That is…” He pushed a finger at the bridge of his glasses. “…I think I feel the same way.”

He feels nothing move in his middle when Lorraine’s hand cups around his own.

 

. . .

It was like taking an over-the-counter drug for a tooth that needed pulling.

The medicine always worked (for a little while), but then the ease would eventually wear off, and that old, familiar aching would slowly creep back to the front; taking up your attention, consuming your thoughts, derailing your day.

Lorraine was nice. Lorraine was  _kind_. Lorraine was undemanding. She was _welcoming_.

But--

When he finally felt like he’d regained something of his former stability, a kind of footing that didn’t leave him cripplingly terrified to stand on his own; that subconscious coil loosened like an overlooked can of worms, and showed him it’s wretched, surviving truth.

Stan  _missed_  Fiddleford.

He admitted this to himself in secret, one night, when he was showering off the smell of bar.

The sharp scent of spilled whiskey disappeared from Stanley’s hands with a deliberate glide of his plain soap, but not before the smell had already clung within his nose and made everything go still inside his skin. He hadn’t been able to do much else outside of sitting down on the bottom of the bathtub and pressing his forehead against the cool tiled wall as he closed his eyes, and tried to keep breathing.

He knew it was most likely irrational and-- and  _stupid_ ; it was despite himself, despite what he’d been told, despite knowing it concerned a person who had made him feel as low as he’d ever been in his life.

Stanley genuinely, sorely  _missed him_.

There was no way Stan would be able to get on with his life if he didn’t-- If he didn’t fucking acknowledge this. A part of him immediately wants to object, reminding the rest that it’s not even been three weeks since-- Well,  _since_. But a larger, far more intimately exhausted part of the boxer was leaning closer to the idea of  _Moving On_  than he thought would be.

He’d climbed out of the tub on autopilot, closing the taps and drying off in much the same state of mind that kept him pouring drinks at the bar.

Stanley was mostly afraid of what sitting back and forcing himself to understand what was happening inside his head and chest would  _mean_. Because, there was a distant, sharp sensation mixed in with the rest of the emotional fallout he’d been dealing with, and it insisted in a language-less sense of  _knowing_  that the space Fiddleford left was never… going to get filled.

Stan remembers a stuffy, uncomfortable afternoon spent with his bubbe, as a child, and her barking rasp rings in his ears:  _“God-shaped holes can’t be fixed by nothing outside of the thing what made them.”_

Boozers could learn to live without alcohol. Junkies could get clean. Cheaters could make the choice to stay with their spouses ‘til death do they part. But they’d all of them still be incomplete people, because they’d made room inside themselves for something that wasn't allowed to last.

Was everything with Fiddleford… was that his “god-shaped hole”?

Stan stepped into one of his old pairs of boxing sweats and reached into his dresser to pull out a soft shirt, and he was already pulling it down over his stomach before realization hit him like a ton of bricks.

He looked over, into his mirror hanging on the wall, instinctively adjusting his glasses when he caught his own gaze. The sight of that logo on the red heathered tee made Stanley’s face do this awful crumple that had him feeling twice as worse, because he was watching the ache spread over his features.

Callused fingertips reached up to trace along the bold lettering in the ‘M’, the screenprinting feeling slick against his skin.

_“Yeah, you can keep that,” Fiddleford said. “I’ve got a pile of ‘em back at the office; I think they shoot ‘em at undergrads during assemblies.”_

Was he going to have to live with this yawning cold space inside himself for the rest of his life?

As if impulsively pressing a bruise, Stanley is suddenly hyperaware of the mild scratch of the label in his shirt’s collar-- When his thoughts start to curl towards the navel and whisper things similar to  _‘it’s expertly cut, and it still doesn’t fit’_ and _‘its brand feels like an actual brand’,_  he wheels on himself and finds comfort in the traditional Pines Family defense: insulting something into submission.

God, what was he, neurotic?  _‘Its brand feels like an actual brand-- Did I really just think that bullshit?’_ Fuck, he couldn’t enjoy anything, could he? Was he always this bad before? 

 _‘I’d rain on my own fucking parade,’_ he thought with a snort.  _‘Fucking Moses.’_

It was just a shirt, now. He had to let go of the  _stupid_ , naïve  _significance_  he’d placed onto it, because that--

\--That chapter of his life was over.

He had to move on.  
He had to focus on what was here, now, with Lorraine.

He  _had_  to.

But it’s not until Stanley is lying in his bed, in the privacy of his dark, locked little room, does his brain sigh out the terrifying rest of his earlier epiphany.

Stan missed Fiddleford because he was still in love with him; that much was obvious.

Stan was just afraid it meant he was in love with someone who couldn’t love him back.

 

. .::. .

 

“Alright, guys-- Dig in!”

Stanford smacked a wet kiss onto his wife’s cheek after she sat down. “Damn, girl,” he praised. “That’s the best-lookin’ meal I think this place has seen in years.”

“Well, if you bought anything more than the trappings of a friggin’ ham sandwich,” Cheryl lovingly sniped, reaching over to help the twins with their plates, “you,  _too_ , could replicate a cooked meal like this outside of a national holiday celebration.”

“Hey!” Stanford countered, carving off some ham. “I made  _a casserole_  that one time--” He looked over to his brother. “Didn’t I, Lee?”  
  
“Dingus,  _I_  made that,” his twin snorted, scooping potatoes. “You just reheated leftovers when you were hungry. You can’t even cook eggs.”

Ford paused around a mouthful of meat. He swallowed: “…Oh, yeah. That’s right.” The side of a fist went to his forehead as he made a pained expression. “Crap.”

Cheryl raised her wine glass. “Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.”

Echoes of the sentiment rung around the table, and the meal continued along the same sort of vein.

Stanley watched his sister-in-law and his brother interact. Cher was great, she really was. She didn’t put up with Stanford’s self-sacrificing, workaholic tendencies, and seemed to naturally counterweigh the “professional student” mentality of her husband. She’d given Ford a pair of incredible, beautiful children, and always seemed up for anything life could throw at her. 

Stanford was so fucking lucky. A normal brain, a super-smart mind, a down-to-earth and devoted wife-- Stanley would have gladly been born with twelve fingers if he’d also been told it would mean he’d wind up in a situation like that.

Sitting in the middle of laughing children, and his smiling siblings, Stanley Pines was suddenly, painful aware of just how alone he really was.

 

. . .

He’s stopped outside the cabin, a couple of hours later.

“You goin’ out?”

Stanley looked up from where he was pulling off the tarpaulin cover from his bike. Ford was standing at the end of the porch, a couple feet above his knees, tapping out a fresh cigarette from his squashed pack. He probably hadn’t smoked since Cheryl had arrived, and was taking the opportunity to sneak a couple while his wife napped with the twins.

“Yeah,” Lee kicked snow from the spokes on his bike. “Dan’s inviting the regulars out for free drinks. You know, ‘cause of the holiday.”

Stanford scratched at his belly with the butt of his lighter. “…Yeah, okay,” he nods. “Alright, bro-bro. Have fun.”

 

. . .

“Alright… Alright, EVERYBODY.” Dan’s baritone cut through the din like a foghorn’s bellow. He was standing beside the breaker, and pushed the line of switches upwards, flooding the Oak with harsh white light. A chorus of grunts and whining groans fills the room.

“There might be fifty ways to leave your lover,” Dan called out, “but there’s only two ways out’a here. Everyone, fuckin’  _go home_.”

Stanley swings the swivel of his stool around until he’s facing away from the bar, and when he goes to stand, everything makes a tilting spin to the right.

 _“Ohh nooo.”_  Stan moans through a laugh, one of his hands reached out and gripping around the lip of the bartop as he tries to steady himself onto his feet. “Ohhhno,” he repeats. “I am  _drunk_.”

Lorraine is at his side, laughing. “Me, too.”

“I can’t drive like this.” Stanley holds out his keys before his face, watching them gleam as he jingled them noisily. “I can’t, I can’t go  _hooome_ …” He moans.

There’s a delighted squawk by his ear, and then Lorraine is saying: “Couch! I’ve got-- I’ve got a couuuch.” She links an arm through his left elbow. “An’ I live… You know. Nearby.”

Stan’s grin is wide and bright. “No shit!  _Really?”_

“Yeah! Let’s--  _Let’s go.”_

 

. . .

Lorraine lived in housing for MGL employees, and the apartment building stood not even two blocks from The Gnarly Oak. Their drunken, hooting stumble along the freezing sidewalk takes them there in no time; Stanley giggling as Lorraine cursed and laughed at her keyring when she kept accidentally inserting the key upside down.

“Weeelcome,” she sings out, once the door is opened. “My humble abode.”

Stan instantly eyes the squat green couch. “Awesome,” he sighs, flopping down onto the cushions. Lorraine follows him, kicking off her shoes. “Man, best Thanksgiving  _ever_ ,” she declares.

“I know!” The bartender agreed, copying his host by unlacing his sneakers.

Lorraine gave a shout of glee. “Dan brought out the good shit tonight! The secret menu-- we got to drink from the secret menu!”

“He won’t even sell that…” A grunt as he finally toed off his shoe. “That last bottle? The one he let you, uh, open? Man,  _nobody_  gets that stuff,” Stanley chuckled.

Lorraine leans back, melting against the cushions as her head rolled over to grin at him. “Yeah, Dan’s the  _best_ ,” she hummed.

Stanley mimicked her pose. He watched the redhead yawn, her slim face wrinkling up cutely.

He surges forward and presses a sloppy kiss to Lorraine’s mouth. Their noses bump. It only lasts for a couple of seconds.

The brunet finds himself opening his eyes when he feels Lorraine’s lips move away and her hands push at his shoulders. He blinks, licks at his lower lip. “…Uh oh,” he whispers. “I’m… I’m sorry, I--”

But then Lorraine is kissing  _him_. 

She pulls back, just an inch or so, and says: “Sleep with me.”

She’s already up to her feet and pulling on his arm, leading him in a wobble down the short hallway to her bedroom when Stan manages to croak out: “O-okay.”

Her bed is small, a utilitarian, particleboard thing that probably came with the apartment. Lorraine stops them at its side, dropping Stanley’s wrist as she starts to shimmy out of her jeans. Stan’s brain catches up, and it makes his hands fumble a few times at his zipper.

Alcohol makes time move hazily and bleed around into one, continuous moment, so when Lorraine has a hand stroking his cock and Stan finds himself on his knees on the mattress, I doesn’t seem like much of a jump when he feels the tight cinch of a condom rolled up to the base of his cock and Lorraine tugging him down and over her as her legs come up around his hips. His mind might be a little lost, but his body understood exactly what he was supposed to do next.

It’s a rut, in the plainest sense. Lorraine’s hands are fisted back into the mattress sheet by her head, and Stanley’s own are gripped around the edge of the short headboard as he found a steady, fast rhythm. His eyes stayed shut, and breath dragged over his tongue through his mouth.

“Ow, dude--  _Ow_ , wait,” Lorraine suddenly said, canting her hips back in a cradle away from the angle of his thrusting. “You’re bumpin’ my cervix, dude,  _ow--”_

Stan’s eyes open and he pulls back a little, blinking. “So--sorry,” he pants.

“S’alright,” Lorraine tells, widening the spread of her thighs. She rocks up to meet his revised pattern, scattered hitches of sound slipping past her lips as her own eyes fall shut; one of her hands moving from its grip at the sheet to shift down and rub the pads of her fingers against her clit.

Air left him in huffs, jumping short and grunted when pleasure suddenly heats within the soft middle of his pelvis, and clenches at his muscles with a gasp.

In the incredible mindlessness of orgasm and liquor, Stan tucks his chin, opens his eyes, expecting--

He catches Lorraine’s green, frowning gaze staring up at him; looks at those pinked cheeks making her freckles stand out against the pale of her skin, her auburn hair fanned out around her head.

\--to see someone else.

Stanley’s hands unclasp from the headboard when he pulls out, straightening and scooting back a pair of awkward, shaking steps on his knees as he rolls the condom off of his softening cock.

A heavy breath leaves Lorraine. But it’s another moment or so before she makes to move.

Stan had enough presence of mind to step off of the bed and to drop the condom in the small trashcan by the closet. He watches as Lorraine levers herself up onto her bottom, her oversized sweatshirt pooling into her lap to cover her nakedness.

Everything’s quiet, and motionless as they stare at each other.

And then, the redhead gets up from the bed, and leaves the room.

Self-conscious shame falls down on Stanley then. He walks over to the far side of the bed and sits heavily, propping his elbows on his knees as his hands come up to cradle his forehead. The buzz of afterglow wasn’t nearly enough to choke out the memory of who he’d really wanted to see when he was inside Lorraine.

There’s the sound of footsteps. Lorraine’s back on the bed, tapping the capped end of a water bottle against his shoulder.

Stanley takes it and drains it gratefully; the cheap plastic crinkling in his grip like a gunshot in the silence of the bedroom.

Lorraine is scratching at her calf when he returns the bottle, and she drops it to the carpet.

“…So, I know you’re still kind’a drunk an’ all,” she says, “but… you weren’t into that.”

Hot, nervous tension roils in his middle as Stan closes his eyes again. A cool hand settles itself onto his upper back, and the bartender finds himself turning around, looking into Lorraine’s eyes. “You were  _not_  into that,” she tells. “Like… Distracted, even.”

He drops his gaze to the sheets as he bites sharply at the inside of his cheek.

“…Who were you wantin’ to see, Stan?” Lorraine asks, her low voice pitched into a kind drawl.

The twist is so strong, so terrible in its piercing ache that it feels like the past month hadn’t even happened.

His voice leaves him in a rough cracking. “I just… I just b-broke up with someone. Right before, before you came into town.” Stanley looks down at his hands, feeling cold helplessness spread in that space inside of him. “And I-- I’m not over it.”

Lorraine’s hand moved from his back to his leg, but it didn’t move. Her touch was just intended as a gentle display of empathy. “Aw, man. What happened?”

He knew it was only concern, and the phrase was as common as mud, but the words throw Stanley back into the livingroom at the cabin, lost in the razorwire inside his head as his brother asks him that same, pitying question. “He, uh. I think he’s got-- problems,” The man tries, pushing up the back of his tongue in a deliberate clearing of his throat. “Not, you know, not  _drugs_  or, or mental things; just… I don’t think he can be… I think he’s not… capable of….” Weariness compresses at his lungs, making his mouth feel nearly too tired to keep speaking. “…Of being in love.”

The woman is quiet, and in the low lighting hitting the bed through the streetlights filtering past the blinds, he can just make out her thoughtful expression. “Huh,” Lorraine grunts. _“‘He’.”_  
  
A twinge of apprehensive hurt flickered in his chest. “What’s’at s’posed to mean?” Stanley frowned.

“Nothin’,  _nothin’_ , I swear,” Lorraine soothed, “It’s just--  _Heh_ , I mean,” She did that shoulder bounce thing, and cracked a wry little grin. “I figured out you weren’t  _real_  into it, but at least it wasn’t  ** _because_**  of me, right?”

The hurt dissipates into slight, bashful levity as the redhead pokes her skinny elbow into his side. “Aw, shaddap,” Stanley grouses, wriggling away from the nudges.

Lorraine follows his lean, digging her elbow further into his soft side. “ _Riiight?”_  She wheedles.

“God, no,  _no_ , just--” He’s yelping out weak laughter when Lorraine doesn’t seem anywhere close to letting him be. “Okay, fine, fine!” Stan shouts, “I like both _, I like_ _both!”_  He breathes and pushes up his glasses as Lorraine moves out of his space. “I’m just--”

“I get it,” she interjects. “You’re hung up on someone specific; dude, it’s okay.” Her lips purse together and slide across her teeth from one pinched corner to the other of her mouth. “If it makes you feel any better,” she offered, “I think you know I’m… kind’a caught up on Corduroy.”

Now it’s Stanley’s turn to nod. “Yeah, it’s, uh. It’s obvious.”

Lorraine fell back across her bed with a groan, pressing her fingers flat against her face. “I  _knoooww_ ,” she mourned. “It’s  _so_  obvious. But he’s so…  _Shy_. Dan Corduroy!” Her arms flung out above her to broaden the revelation. “Can you believe it? Manly Dan!  _Shy!”_

A bubble of laughter jumps through the last of his tension like breaking through ice. “Yeah, it’s-- Heh, it’s kind’a pathetic.”

“Nah, it’s cute. He’s  _so cute_ ,” she gushed. “The man likes pop music and baby animals, like, damn. Have you ever seen him tear apart a pinball machine with his bare hands? He’s got  _everything_ , Stan.”

Scattered giggles leave them both. 

Lorraine dropped her arms and patted the slim, empty space beside her. “C’mere, dude.”

Stan folds out onto his back with a grateful sigh. It’s an unspoken, mutual decision for them to shift around until the blanket is draped up around their hips, and Stanley passes over his glasses for Lorraine to leave on her nightstand; laying his head on the second pillow pulled from beneath Lorraine’s own.

“…Why d’you think he can’t love?” Lorraine asked, lowly, a minute or so later. “Your guy.”

He makes a miniscule roll of his shoulder. “Stuff he said,” Stan murmurs. “Real… Fucked up shit. The night we broke up. Like… Like, he was angry and upset because I said I-- loved him.” The brunet’s voice was faint, closer to a whisper. “He got mean. I wasn’t expecting-- I wasn’t expecting him to be so  _mean_.”

Lorraine gave a noncommittal noise. “People got problems,” she told. “Some got more than others. Maybe his are all he’s had. Pain’s difficult to let go of, man.”

Stan hums in his chest, licking his lips. Lorraine yawned. “Who is he, anyway?” She wondered, her drawl sliding over vowels; she sounded as tired as he did.

He takes a few seconds to get ahold of his tongue, and another handful to make it say what he wants.

The name comes out on an exhale. “…Fiddleford McGucket.”

It’s the first time he’s said the engineer’s name out loud since their breakup.

Lorraine is still; her brain sluggishly trying to piece things together. “…Holy shit,” she states.

“Yeah.”

“I work for that guy.”

“I know.”

She doesn’t say anything. But then, her strong, long-fingered hand is wrapping around the one Stan has resting beside his pillow. Her whispered comfort is nice, but not much of an encouragement. “Good luck with that, man.”

Stanley just shuts his eyes.

The next morning drags him out of bed with a bit of hangover, but he found he could stomach the watery, early-morning sunlight  _without_  feeling like he had to blow chunks, so Stanley counted himself lucky.

He crawls out of Lorraine’s bed and paws his glasses onto his face, immediately looking around for his underwear. The redhead doesn’t wake; she just stretches out into the warm space Stanley left behind with a sawing snore.

His pants are pulled up, and soon Stan’s collecting his jacket and his shoes from the livingroom without any fanfare. Lorraine was sleeping too hard; it’d be rude to wake her. She would probably be back around the Oak, anyways.

Stanley stomps down the building’s outer stoop with a dazed squint, blinking in the sunlight as his head cleared. Hungover, yeah, but--

He felt mostly okay. Maybe even something closer to how he’d been feeling when he’d first gotten to this town. Aligned better.  _'Something.'_

He pushes his hands into his jacket pockets, and starts off down the right sidewalk.

Stanley knew he was… going the long way ‘round to trying to be more “normal”. He knew it was going to be more of a struggle for-- for him, compared to Stanford. There was a lot he probably wasn’t going to get to do, or be able to do.

But, it’d been a month. Stan had managed to speak Fiddleford’s name, and he  _hadn’t_  felt like crying. 

Maybe Lorraine really was helping him.

 

. . .

Cold, choking terror plows through his skin, shortening his lungs and clenching everything together in a gripping, panicked sickness he has absolutely no present sense to explain. He probably would have felt calmer if a bomb had been dropped on the café.

The level of  _distress_  screaming in his head feels like madness.

He liked this café; it was quiet, and within walking distance of one of his company’s main housing blocks. If there was a dispute with a tenant and the landlord wanted to contact him (which the sweaty bastard usually liked to do in the mornings), Fiddleford could jaywalk right across and get it sorted within minutes.

So, he couldn’t decide if it was some kind of cruel, cosmic joke playing out or simple, “right place/wrong time” coincidence that has him sitting here, on  _this_  morning, when Stanley Pines stumbles out blearily onto the street from that very same building and saunters away past his view-- in a  _very obvious_  walk of shame. 

The thought makes Fiddleford want to flip his table through the fucking window even as impotent, possessive rage claws at his insides just as much as it makes his limbs feel too heavy to move.

He’d been  _busy_. He’d had no time to spare for past…  _mistakes_.

The word prickles like barbed wire in his head.

But, he had  _heard things_ , of course. He’d caught glimpses, but he hadn’t, hadn’t thought--

Water rushing; blood in his ears. Phantom fingers around his throat, his shoulders, holding him down, keeping him from getting air, and he  _deserved it, he deserved--_

Fiddleford felt like he was drowning.

 

. . .

All she’d been trying to do was walk to her bedroom, but a jangly, fragile-sounding rattle echoed behind the door of the guest sittingroom, and Vicky’s nosiness piqued with proprietary curiosity.

The room was predictably unlit, yet held that tangible feeling of someone being somewhere inside.

Noise off to the left had Victoria flicking on a small lamp, spreading just enough light to illuminate the outline of-- her husband.

In a distant, dim corner, in between an armoire and an open liquor cabinet, sat Fiddleford. He was on the floor, his back propped up against a bare space of wall, with his short legs stuck out in a slack ‘V’ on the rug. He’d taken off his glasses at some point, and his shoes. By the look of the obvious dent in the stock inside the nearby cabinet, and the scattered handful of empties tossed to the side from where the engineer was sitting, he’d most likely been trying to drink himself to death.

The man was an absolute wreck.

The engineer didn’t look up when the blonde stepped closer. “G’on, Vicky,” he mumbled. His eyes were fixed somewhere on the far wall of dark windows. “Giddout.” Alcohol had taken his accent and let it stretch into the lazy, rolling thing Vicky knew it should usually sound like if Fiddleford weren’t so aware of it.

“Well, I was,” Victoria began, “but now, I’m a little worried you’re gon’a do to yourself what you did to your nightstand.”

“Pfft.  _Worried_.” He raised the bottle in his fist and drank a long swig, pulling back from the lip with a grimace. “Worry ‘bout me,  _pff_.” His hand reached up and gripped the edge of the cabinet to help haul himself to his feet, but the hoisting shift threw his equilibrium for a loop, and made him start to stumble over.

Vicky jumped forward and caught the man before he could fall on his face. “Okay, alright, here--”

Fiddleford immediately tried to fight her, dropping the bottle he held. The glass bounced and splashed bourbon in a messy arc onto the floor as it rolled away.  _“GiddOFF’A ME_ ,” Fidd shouted, slurring and dangerous in his uncoordinated anger, “fuck--  _Fuck off.”_

“You dumb asshole,” Victoria snapped, managing to avoid the majority of his aimless smacks while still keeping him upright. “I’m just trying to help.”

“Don’t.  _Don’t_.” Fiddleford yanked himself free and started pointing a stiff finger in her face. His eyes were wide, and full of violent warning. “Don’t’chu  _fuckin’…_ Don’t  _nobody_  help me,” he commanded, instinctively spreading his feet so he didn’t fall over. “I deserve this,” he snarled, gaze wandering off from Victoria’s face to somewhere down around the baseboards. The dreadful bend around his eyes and mouth was dark, and full of hate.  _“I deserve this.”_

The hate dissolved into despondency. Fiddleford sank to his knees. “…I don’t deserve a damn thing.”

Victoria just watches him.

Fiddleford reached up and did a graceless swipe of his dress shirtsleeve under his nose, and over his dewy eyes. “I hate myself.” The words are pitiable in their audible wetness, their furious self-loathing. “I fuckin’… I fuckin’ ha-- _hate who I am_ ,” He admitted, drawl catching thickly in his mouth. “I don’t, I-- I don’t know who I’m s’posed to be.”

He roughly scrubs his hands over his face, bringing additional redness to the splotches already at his cheeks. “I’m no good to  _nobody_ ,” he declares, absolutely dejected. “I sh-should’a… should’a been born dead. I should’a not even made, made it out--” The heels of Fiddleford’s hands curl against his eyes as his mouth carries on. “--out the womb. I’ve never been nothin’ but tr-trouble.”

It was like he was reciting old, memorized lines.

“Too weak. Too skinny.  _Smartass. Show off. Sneaky lil’ ba-bastard._ Don’t deserve nothin’ good, can’t make no one  _happy_ , I--”

Something sounds  _terrible_ \-- a miserable, wet kind of noise is slapping against the polished wood floor, and the sound of it makes Fidd’s gut roll a little. When his chest starts to heave, and his throat pains with a raw burn, Fiddleford distantly realizes the sounds are coming from him.

He’s crying. No, not crying--  _sobbing_ ; unhinged gasps and howls leave him as though forced.

This was what he was reduced to.

This isolated, polluted  _freak_  who’d become so adulterated, so snide and malicious that he instinctively rejects all love, but the subconscious acknowledgment of a return to solitude taxes him to the point of hysteria.

Fiddleford curls forward, holding his head as he weeps.

There’s a sad sigh, and a dull thump on the floor at his side. “Come here,” Victoria orders, her voice soft. She pulls at his shoulders, maneuvering the small man around until he was curled on his side on the plush rug, his head pillowed in his wife’s lap.

“All I do is hurt people,” Fidd sniffs.

The blonde’s fingers comb through his messy, tangled hair. “That’s just the moonshine talking, Fiddleford,” she counters.

“Vicky. I’d trade it  _all_ , Vicky,” he swears. “I’d, I’d…”

“I know you would, Fidds.” Victoria is honest. “I know you would.”

They sit like that for a long while. Fiddleford’s crying seeps a slick, wet spot into the polyester of Vicky’s skirt, but she doesn’t say anything.

“I’m no good,” the engineer starts up. “I’m  _no good_ , ain’t never, ain’t never been…”

“ _Shhh_ ,” she soothes.

“Ain’t never been worth nothin’,” Fiddleford continues, not hearing the shush. “I’on’t deserve all…” His arm arcs up, encompassing the palatial sittingroom. “… _THIS SHIT_.”

Vicky breathes out noisily. “God damn, Fiddleford.”

“Everyday. I wan’a take a… take a match to this, th-this  _cathedral_ , this…” He frowns, drops his arm. “ _Empty temple_ , every damn day.”

“I live here, too, you know.”

“I’on’t care,” he sniffs.

His next sentence is tiny, and something like broken.

“…Should’a been drowned in the tub.”

Victoria’s hand pauses in his hair for a second. “Okay, now that’s morbid.” She looks down, sees Fiddleford’s eyes are closed, and his brow is still bent with pain.

“I’m rot to the core,” he mumbled. “I wish I was dead.”

“Stop thinking,” Vicky directed. “Sleep this off.”

“Got no excuse for the state I’m in. I deserve everythin’ bad.”

The gentle scratch of her fingernails is the last thing he feels before the weight in his arms and legs pulls him further under.

“Just go to sleep, Fiddleford.”

 

. . .

Stanford is banging together some large, round… thing in the front room, and Lee sidesteps a sticking-out piece as he edges through the door.

“Hey, brother,” Ford calls out, not looking up from his hands.

“…Hey,” Lee returns. He stares for a minute. “Kids’re gone, I take it?”

“Yeeup.” Stanford exchanges his hammer for a folded sheet of blueprints, and frowns at it for a second. He reaches up past his shoulder, yanks open a compartment door behind the beam before him, and a cascade of colored wire tumbles down in front of his face, like stiff streamers. The researcher grunts, batting the wires away as he leans back and sits on his heels. “I’ve been dyin’ to get back into workin’ on this thing for a month. I love my wife, bro, and I love my kids,” Ford swore, “but I can’t work with them around.”

“I get you,” Stanley said, scooting to sit up on the counter on the far left wall.

“Speakin’ of work,” Ford began, raising his voice to be heard better when he leaned back into the framework of-- whatever the fuck that thing was supposed to be. “You’ve been alright with yours? I’ve only seen you in the evenings for the past coupl’a weeks, dude.”

“Uh, yeah,” Lee answers. He clasps his hands together between his knees, knocking his sneakered heels against the counter’s cheap wood siding. The hightops make blunt, quiet scuffing sounds when they hit. “There’s, eh, some new friend of Dan’s who’s been comin’ ‘round the joint lately. Real nice person, easy to talk to.”

There’s a dull thumping from within the steel archway; Ford must have started smacking something with his palm. “That’s kind of cool,” Stanley hears his brother state absently.

Stan swallowed, a hard roll with the back of his tongue, opening his mouth as he took an encouraging breath.

“…I slept with her,” he tells, the words a half-shout to get heard.

The thumping stopped. Stanford angles his head and shoulders out from behind the metal, the rest of his kneeled body following as he ambled a couple steps on his knees. He pushes a finger up at his glasses, smearing a little dirt along his nose. “…‘ _Her’?”_  Ford parrots, sounding obviously taken aback.

“Y-yeah.”

Stanford is quiet, thoughtful. Stanley unconsciously holds his breath.

“I haven’t checked on you in a while,” Ford eventually, randomly states.

Lee feels himself make an annoyed frown, blowing out air through his nose. “You don’t have to check on me--”

“--Shut up, yes, I do,” Ford cuts in, mirroring the frown. When Stanley throws out a frustrated sigh, the researcher continues: “So. You doin’ okay?”

All the boxer does, at first, is bunch his shoulders and wobble his head a little. And then Lee says: “Yeah. I mean--” He shrugs again. “--Heh, as good as I’ll ever be. I guess.”

Stanford seems to accept this, and he turns back to his machine. He rummages through a small, plastic toolbox beside his hip, pulling out a wrench as he asks: “Well… This  _woman_. Was it any good?”  
  
The memory of fucking Lorraine sends an uncomfortable echo of nervousness winding in Stanley’s gut. “…No.”

His twin doesn’t push any further. “Maybe it’s just gon’a take some time, bro-bro,” he suggests.

The intimate awareness of that hollow cold below his ribs whispers otherwise.

 

. .::. .

 

_“HEY, FAY!”_

Lorraine released the gun’s trigger, stopping the welding arc mid-bead. She straightened back from her crouch over the beam, shifting her grip on the nozzle into one hand as she lifted the mask off of her face with the other. She looked around for a moment, before noticing Dale in his station across from her was gesturing with his head towards the front of the building. The foreman was up in the control booth, motioning with his free hand through the window for her to come in; his other was gripped around the walkie-talkie for the intercom.

“Yeah?” Lorraine asked when she stepped onto the landing. She pulled off her gloves and skated a hand over the top of her hair, pressing down fly-away frizz from her ponytail.

“Call came in for you,” the foreman told, scribbling a quick signature in the corner of a site release. “From the Manor. Mr McGucket wants to see you.” He jerked his head over at the wall of cubbies. “You should get your stuff. There’s a paid cab waitin’ for you at the gate.”

Lorraine’s eyebrows rose as she shrugged off her overcoat and exchanged it for her jacket. “Whoa, for real?” She packed away her gloves into her lunchpail, and commented: “That’s weird. Nobody like us gets to talk to the bossman’s bossman.”

“I _knooow_ ,” Louis commented loudly from the corner kitchen. He was filling up his battered plastic travel mug with a new pot of that piping hot bullshit the foreman tried to pass off as coffee, and was eyeing Lorraine with a suspicious leer. “What’d you do? Fuck his wife, or something?”

“Sounds like something I’d do,” Lorraine shot back, walking over to take the form from the foreman. As she crossed back to the exit, she added: “Only, I mean, I  _would_ \-- were I not fuckin’  _your wife_ for  _you_ , Louis.”

“HEY!” Louis shouted after her. He flipped his middle finger up as she laughed her way down the stairs.

 

. . . 

The cabbie drove the direct route to McGucket Manor, taking hilly service roads Lorraine distantly recognized as the ones only Manor staff vehicles were allowed to use. She only knew this because sometimes the crew bus that drove MGL laborers to a job site would come from this way, and sometimes she and her coworkers had to wait for off-the-clock service employees from the Manor to leave the bus.

They slowed through a checkpoint where a security guard had to nod at the prominent numbered MGL decal stickered to a corner of the windshield before the cabbie could get back to speed, and then they passed through some stereotypically thick Oregonian pine forest before the woods suddenly stopped at the edge of a long, trimmed lawn.

The driver rolled them around a big curving pathway, and stopped at the bend that touched the foot of a flight of wooden steps.

“This is the staff entrance,” the cabbie told Lorraine. “Mr McGucket told me to tell you to go inside and ask the butler guy to escort you up.”

“A’ight man, thanks,” Lorraine said as she scooted out.

“Godspeed,” the cabbie offered, right before she shut the door. As he drove off, Lorraine felt herself frown.

Why would she need “ _godspeed_ ”?

As the butler led Lorraine down a few halls and up a couple flights of stairs, Lorraine tried to remember what she knew (or assumed she knew) of Fiddleford H. McGucket.

They were definitely not in the same social class, for starters. She knew that he basically owned the town, most of the county, and probably a majority of the state. She knew he was absurdly rich (if the sheer, visible  _expensiveness_  of her current surroundings didn’t make it known already), and that from the recent rate of McGucket Laboratories’ exponential outward-in-all-fucking-directions growth, McGucket had to be some kind of shrewd business wizard. (Lorraine could barely sit still and pay attention long enough to tend to a fucking garage sale, let alone manage an actual, physical business.)

She did know, however, from a few of the press releases and speeches she’d heard him do around Gravity Falls, that McGucket had to originally be some interesting flavor of Southern, like herself. But, that was really where their similarities ended.

 _‘Outside of whatever the hell was up between him and Stanley Pines,’_  Lorraine’s brain absently added.

She bumped into a soft form, and blinked. The butler had stopped them in front of a very nice wooden door-- planks of dark stain polished oak fitted with a subtle, yet classy brass knob. For a second, Lorraine heard Dan Corduroy’s gruff baritone wax weird and philosophical inside her head about the beauties of wood, and what kind of “ _treasure_ ” one could only make when they “ _truly respected a tree.”_

She realized she was smiling to herself when the butler pointedly coughed.

He looked at her with a slight frown. One of his gloved hands, already having knocked, rested patiently on the doorknob.

Lorraine coughed. “Uh, it’s nothing. Sorry.”

The man just gave a non-committal “ _Hmm_ ”, and then he was pushing through the portal, that beautiful Corduroy-worthy door swinging inwards before them.

Lorraine wished she were in a place where she could make an impressed whistle.  _‘Damn, now this is a swanky joint.’_

It was a cozy study; still somewhat high-ceilinged and really quite a big room, but compared to the massive spaces in the rest of the Manor that Lorraine had seen, this room was cozy. Books,  _everywhere_ \-- two whole walls were floor-to-crown-moulding with packed bookcases showing spines of all sorts. A solid, broad wooden desk sat in front of a wall of windows, with a roaring, wide fireplace and mantle to the left. Lorraine wiggled her toes in her boots, scooting the soles against the plush carpeting as she admired the subtle, no-nonsense décor. This was a nerd cave, plain and simple. (An  _expensive_  nerd cave, a scientist-grade nerd cave-- but no matter how they dressed it up, all nerds tended to decorate the same.)

Fiddleford McGucket was sitting in the middle of the desk, bent over a blotter and a small stack of papers, backlit by the weak, mid-afternoon winter sun coming from the windows behind.

He didn’t look up when they entered, but Lorraine did hear him call out in a polite monotone: “Thank you, Jefferson; that will be all.”

“Very good, sir,” the butler-- Jefferson --bowed a little before pulling the door shut as he left.

A few moments passed.

McGucket still didn’t look up. Lorraine waited, listening to the scratch of McGucket’s pen and the nearby crackle of burning firewood. She consciously tried not to stand too awkwardly.

Right as she was opening her mouth to try and say something, McGucket set down his pen and straightened up in his seat. He folded his hands neatly, and rest his forearms against the edge of his desk.

Lorraine looked at him. He watched her; his face calm, impassive.

“You don’t have any chairs in front of your desk,” she stated. McGucket didn’t shift.

“This is my personal study,” he said, accent folding syllables with a warm, nasal ease. “I don’t want to invite people to think they can stick around.”

Lorraine crooked a brow for a second. “Uh. Okay.”

Fiddleford watched her, unblinking, before he picked up the papers he’d been writing. “I have here your contract with MGL,” he told.

Lorraine frowned, concern growing. “Is there somethin’ wrong with it?”

“No.”

She sighed. “Oh, that’s good.”

“It’s being voided. You are officially fired from your position workin’ for the C&D Division.”

Her jaw dropped.  _“What?”_

“And from this day forward,” Fiddleford continued, ignoring her outburst, “you are to be blacklisted from applyin’ for future employment with any branch or faction of McGucket Laboratories.”

“What?!” Lorraine shouted again. “What?  _Why?!_  I’ve done nothing to deserve this! What have I done wrong?”

“Nothing,” Fiddleford said. “Your employment history with my company has been exceptional.” He thumbed through the contract, reading off points of interest. “Never any disciplinary actions taken or needed any further than with immediate job-site hierarchy, never requested time off for longer than what was allotted, excellent display of skillset competence and work ethic, as well as glowin’ recommendations and commentary from the majority of your past project overseers--”

“Then why cut me out?!” Lorraine demanded, feeling herself get shrill as panic and helplessness set in. Her heart pounded in her chest. “Why?! This is wrong as shit, and  _you know it!_  I’m a good worker! I--”

“It’s not up to you,” Fiddleford cut in. “It’s up to  _me_. This is  _my_  comp’ny. What I say is what is  _goin’_  to, and will always, happen.”

“So, you’re just singlin’ me out?!” She spat. “Is no one else being sacked like this? You can’t do this! You don’t even know me!”

Fiddleford stood up. “I know that if you’re fired, you’ll have to leave the company housing you’re currently livin’ in.” He walked around his desk towards Lorraine, metal forefinger dragging along the woodgrain. “And if you’re forced to leave there, you won’t be able to get a place anywhere else in town, because your income will no longer exist. And, I know you don’t have enough in your savin’s to put up the good faith payment for a new lease.”

Wide-eyed, Lorraine stared at Fiddleford, mouth open in shock. “How…”

“And,” he added, finally, in a voice full of a kind of rude aplomb, “if you can’t stay in town, you  _won’t_  stay in town. Because there is nothing here for you; nothin’ you can justify enough to remain in a place where you got no family, few friends outside of work, and no other ties to the community."

Fiddleford stopped in front of Lorraine. She was a couple inches or so taller than him, but the self-righteous confidence he radiated made the height difference feel reversed. He took a step closer to her, looking deliberately into her face as his expression changed from detached assurance into something dark, and ugly, like a peek inside to how he truly felt.

He coldly said: “If you thought you could keep Stanley Pines without havin’ to put up any kind of a fight, you fuckin’ better think again.”

The helplessness instantly morphed upwards into fury.  _“You’re firin’ me because you’re jealous of me and Stanley fuckin’ Pines?!”_

“And you can’t stop me,” Fiddleford snapped.

Lorraine stepped away, baffled. “You stupid fucker,” she spat, “I’m not interested in Stanley Pines!”

McGucket frowned, and Lorraine couldn’t help the wild laugh that left her mouth. “God, he was right about you,” she said. “You’re a _mean_  streak of piss, aren’t’cha?”

“I know you’ve been with him,” Fiddleford told quickly, “You’ve been back in Gravity Falls not three weeks, and you’ve been almost attached to Stan’s hip.”

“We slept together once!” Lorraine shouted. “Just the once! We weren’t even dating!”

If looks could kill, Lorraine suddenly wondered, the glower on McGucket’s face would definitely have a body count. She pursed her lips, chest still fluttering with adrenaline. “…You didn’t know I slept with him, did you?”

“ ** _No_**.” The word was icy.

“Well, it’s never going to happen again, because Stanley Pines is not into me, and  _I’m_  not into him. Okay?” Lorraine asked. “This was just a horrible misunderstandin’, you can see that now. Can I have my job back?”

Fiddleford brought his prosthetic right hand up to his chest and cradled its wrist in his other. He absently traced the flush joints of the metal with his human forefinger, rolling the pad of the digit over the shaped knuckles. He was looking down and to the side, still frowning. He backed up slowly, until his bottom met the lip of his desk, and he adjusted his stance to prop up a lean.

“…No,” he repeated. Fiddleford shook his head. “No, you’re still fired.”

Lorraine felt her heart drop into her stomach.

“That’s not  _fair_ ,” she insisted. Her face was feeling hotter, and her eyes prickled.

“Too bad,” McGucket said. He made a one-shoulder shrug, and when he looked back at her, his face showed nothing but dead-eyed resolve.

“You slept with Stanley,” Fiddleford explained. “I can’t trust you. I wasn’t plannin’ to at all, in the first place, but now-- I  _really_  know I can’t trust you.” He drummed three fingers against the back of his metal hand. “You, a  _woman_ , achieved an intimacy with him that destroys any possible distance you could have kept. So, now, it’s either I fire you and make you leave this town for good, or--”

A light. Just a flicker, no more than a flash-- a glimmer of something terrible, something hurting and desperate lit Fiddleford McGucket’s gaze for just a second as he said to her: “--Or I destroy you completely.”

Lorraine bit the inside of her lower lip. She would not cry here. She would  _not_.

Fiddleford circled back around his desk and returned to his chair. “Now, get the hell out’a my house, please,” he ordered politely.

She didn’t wait.

As Lorraine pulled open the door, she snarled back a sudden “ ** _Fuck_** _you_ ”, and yanked it to slam after her.

 

. . .

“I’m just sayin’, Dan-- Tourists fuckin’ love to spend money on stupid shit when they’re on vacation,” Stanley explained, big hands gesticulating around as he spoke. “It’s the whole vacation mentality: They’re not thinkin’ about the future, they’re thinkin’ about the _now_ \-- and they don’t care if they’re wastin’ their cash on keychains or tickets to look at a big ball o’ yarn beside the highway. They don’t care, they’re on  _vacation!”_  He barks a laugh, stacking coasters as he talks. “And they like attractions; weird shit they feel like they won’t ever get to see back home. So, like, I’m thinkin’--”

Here, he leaned on an elbow near where Dan was taste-testing a recently pulled draft from a new keg. Stan adjusts his glasses.

“What if someone set up a shed, you know, with a bunch’a strange crap glued together and called them somethin’ intriguing, yet… stupid.” He pursed his lip, crinkling his brow. “Like… Mysteries in the woods. You wouldn’t even have to do much, like, take a fake leg and stick an eye on it-- BAM!” The bartender clapped his palms together, smiling wide. “You’ve got an attraction right there!” The hands spread, making a razzled little wiggle. “ _Thighclops_. Think about it. Dumb-dumbs on holiday will throw their money to take pictures with something that weird!”

Dan licked his lip, looking down into the stein clutched in his fist. “‘ _Thigh clops’_ ,” he grunted. “I like that.”

Stanley gave a delighted, proud hoot. “I know, right?!”

“There’s still something wrong with you.”

“Oh, screw you, pal,” the brunet dismissed. “I’m funny.” Stan started patting his apron as he glanced around. “I’m gon’a write that one down.”

They’d spent the morning pretty much doing exactly this. Business was usually slower, the lumberjack had said, around this time of year; what with the big holidays approaching. Familial obligation trumped a boozing winter warmth every time. Only a handful of people had come in for a drink since they’d opened.

So when the bell jingled, Stan was actually prepared to greet the newcomer.

“Welcome to the Gnarly--” He stopped, blinking as he recognized the woman who’d entered. “Oh, hey Lorraine. What--” The question died in his throat as she came closer, and his brown eyes went wide. “ _Geez_ , what happened?”

“Are you alright?” Dan demanded, stomping off of his stool. “Did someone hurt you?”

Lorraine was red-faced and scowling, and her eyes were pink with tears. She kept wiping at them with the end of her sleeve. She was in a bulky, heavy pair of workpants and boots, and a ratty sweatshirt. She looked like she’d just come from work, but it was way too early.

“I just got  _fired_ ,” she bit out, voice thick and angry.

“ _What?”_

The redhead levered herself onto a stool and plopped her bag onto the bar. “Fiddleford fuckin’ McGucket fired me.  _Himself_ ,” she spat. “In person. Nobody ever gets fired by the boss.  _Nobody_ ,” she stressed.  
  
Stanley watched as Dan came around from where he’d gone behind the bar to fetch Lorraine a clean, dry handtowel. The woman takes the cloth with a tight, closed-lipped smile at Dan, and then she blows her nose into it.

“…God,” Stan tried, feeling tension crawl into his chest. “What’d you do?”

“Nothing!” Lorraine exploded, her brow wrinkling with rage even as her eyes overflowed. “I ain’t done a damn thing, and  _he told me that_. He knows I’m a solid employee, but he-- He just wants me gone,” she tells. “He said that to my face, like, he wants me  _gone_. He just wants me out of Gravity Falls,  _out_  of this state, and I-- I’mon’a have to go.” By now, Lorraine was crying outright. “I was stayin’ in company housing; I can’t get another apartment. I can’t afford rent in this town! I don’t have a job!”

Dan stares at her with a crestfallen expression. “Lorraine…”

“Lorraine, there’s got to be  _something_  you can do to stay here,” Stanley tries. “Like, the diner--”

 _“Nobody’ll hire me outside of the manual labor market, Stan,”_  the redhead bawled. She had the towel crumpled up and pressed to her eyes. “I’ve got  _priors_ ,” Lorraine said. “MGL hired me because I was willin’ to travel, and I passed the competency exam.” She gasped as fresh tears followed the tracks streaking through the dirt on her face. “MGL is the o-only company in this country that will hire off the street, and they don’t ca-- _care_  about non-violent offenders.” She’s silenced for a moment by damp snivels. “My freakin’ golden goose just flew off an’ shat on me all at the same time,” she mourned.

Something like real, raw  _anger_  started to burn through to Stanley’s fists.

“I can’t go back to Alabama,” Lorraine whimpered, “I just  _can’t_.” The patter of her accent took on a tight, fretful lilt. “I-- I can’t.”

Dan Corduroy spread one of his huge hands across her slim back. “…Rainey,” he rumbled.

“An--And he _told me_ he didn’t care,” she adds, leaning on one of her elbows against the bar, her hand fisted in her hair as she cried. “He, he-- McGucket, he fuckin’ told me he didn’t, he didn’t give a  _shit_  what happened to me, b-because  _he_  was firin’ me, and I just--” Lorraine closed her eyes as her mouth went wobbly, and she leaned into Dan’s broad, welcoming chest. “--I just had to  _deal_."

The lumberjack’s arms came up and wrapped around Lorraine after reaching down to pull her stool closer to his. For a moment, all Dan did was cradle her, petting her hair as he murmured comfort like a dull roar against her ear. And then, he looked up, starting to say: “Pines, go get--”

But Stanley was gone.

 

. . .

The drive up to McGucket Manor would have given him more of an emotional ache, Stanley absently registered, had he not been angry enough to want to burn it down.

He doesn’t waste time with parking the Triumph in the garage. Stanley kicks down the bike’s stand with a furious snap of his shoe, angling the motorcycle in a sideways lean with one tire on the gravel drive, one on the lawn. He stomps up the service stairs two at a time and pushes through the door leading into the kitchen, and finds Vicky leafing through a magazine on the island counter.

The blonde looks up, blinking owlishly at him for a split-second, before dropping open her mouth to start: “Hey, kid--”

“Where the  _fuck_  is Fiddleford,” Stan demands, stuffing his road goggles into his jacket pocket; the words a furious clench through his teeth.

A manicured hand instantly points towards the far silver door as Vicky tells: “Same hall as his bedroom, last door at the end of the runner. It’s his study.”

“Thanks,” Stan tosses out, loping across the kitchen.

 _“Don’t kill him,”_  Victoria calls after Stanley,  _“I signed a prenup, and I’m not in his will!”_

The bartender eventually finds the door and rolls the handle over in his fist, muscling through with a buoyant fury.

Fiddleford looks up at the doorway, just an upwards glance from beneath his brows, but then he’s immediately straightening with an unintentional look of baffled surprise smoothing his face when he realizes it’s Stan.

The split-second recovery of that side-blinded surprise being recolored into arrogant annoyance makes butterflies of a different species altogether swarm in Stanley’s belly.

Anger is taking the wounded ache in his gut and mixing it with the  _saneless_  flutter of longing in his chest, and translating the feelings into a jarring, single-minded fuel that sends him prowling across the rug like a caged beast; tension keeping his limbs tight and ready, positively  _itching_  for a fight.

The bartender doesn’t look over at his ex very much, but whenever he does, he finds the engineer still looking as controlled and cool as ever, yet there’s a clenched kind of micro-expression in the hood of Fiddleford’s gaze that makes his deliberately angry loathing at Stan’s presence absolutely clear.

_‘Too damn bad.’_

Stan stills and rounds on the desk, roaring: “What the  _fuck_ , Fiddleford?!” He swings a broad arm out to the side to gesture with the demand. “What’s your  _problem?!_  Why’d you fire Lorraine?!”

“Like that’s any of  _your_  business,” Fiddleford bites out. His hands are clenching fists where he’s got them pressed down at the edge of his desk. His posture is firm, proudly straight where he’s sitting in the chair. “Now, please leave.”

“Like  _hell_  I’m gon’a go,” the bartender counters. He feels squared up, tight like he was pitted against the ugliest, meanest brawler on the circuit. “You just fucked her over for  _no reason_. She’s my friend.”

“I knew she was your friend.”

“Wait-- What? You took away her job because she was my friend?” The glare he feels turn his brow is hard. “So, I can’t have friends, now?!”

Fiddleford raised his right index finger, eyes already looking a little wild. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

“Don’t I dare  _what_ , Fidd?”

“Don’t you  _dare_  say I’m that petty--”

“Well, you goddamned are!” Stan roared, taking a closer step to the desk. “You’re a petty, heartless little jackass! All you do is break anything that comes near you!”

“Strong words comin’ from a ham-handed blockhead with only a highschool diploma to his name!” The engineer shouted.

“Oh,  _screw you, Fiddleford!”_  Stanley thundered. “Everything about you is so fake; you’re just this pissed-off little  _jerk_.” The words fire out of Stanley from a place in the middle of that aching coil, making him shout back some of the poison Fiddleford had slung onto him four weeks ago. “You’re so fuckin’  _charming_ , but you chew people up if they’re  _stupid_  enough to stick around you for too long. No wonder you prefer being around all those  _‘silver spoon assholes’_ you bitched about; at least they know it’s not worth their fancy, fancy fucking time to stay near you any longer than a handshake.” Stan paced a few steps in front of the desk, adrenaline making him antsy. “I mean, god-- I’m glad I met Lorraine,” he told. “She’s  _nice_.  _You’re_  only nice if you think you can use it to squeeze a dollar out’a someone.”

“Well, that’s just fuckin’  _great_ , isn’t it? Good for you, I’m  _so_  happy  _you’re so happy_  with her.” The pompous condescension in Fiddleford’s voice is a mean memory of that awful night. “That redheaded Alabama garbage--  _Good for you, Stanley.”_

A throaty, wordless shout barreled out of Stan as he slung his arms out, an exasperated gesture. _“Damn it, Fiddleford!_  Why did you fire her?!”

“I don’t have to tell you shit, Stanley Pines! I’m done!” The shorter man was leaning up, over his desk as he flung a furious point towards the door. “Get the hell out!”

“Why?! The fuck is wrong with you?!”

“Fuck off! I can’t stand the sight of you!” Fiddleford rounded his desk, face red with rage. “GET OUT!”

“If you can’t  _‘stand the sight of me’_ ,” Stanley thundered, feeling the most hateful he’d had in a long time,  _“it’s only because you fucking ruined the best thing that ever happened to you!”_

Fiddleford stopped a few feet away, still pointing at the door. “GET. OUT.”

“Shut the fuck up, McGucket,” Stan shouted, “I’m not going anywhere until you give me  _a_ _goddamned answer!”_

Fiddleford screamed _: “I HAD TO GET RID OF HER!”_

His hands are gripping at the sides of his head, his eyes are firmly screwed shut, and he’s screaming in this raw, desperate kind of howl that has Stan instinctively wanting to do anything,  _anything to make it stop._

“I  _HAD_  TO GET RID OF HER!” The older man bellows, “I had to make her leave for good because-- Because I can’t bear the thought of you loving anyone else, _Stanley, I just can’t! I can’t handle it! I won’t! **I WON’T, DAMN IT!”**_

It was like the universe had just sucked in its breath.  
Everything goes still. 

Stanley stares at him.

Fiddleford feels petrifying, spotlight panic fall onto him, and he fumbles for words: “I-I meant, it’s not, I-- I was--”

He’s trying to hide wiping away an errant stress-tear that’s leaked down the bridge of his nose when Stanley suddenly steps forward and wraps Fiddleford tightly in his arms.

Instantly, Fiddleford’s  _panic_  translates into  _fight_ \-- He’s pushing and swatting at Stan’s chest with his fists from the circle of those strong arms, but Fiddleford was no match for the bartender. Any other man would have been on the floor by now, but Stanley is no common meathead.

_(Before, his inherent gentleness with Fiddleford had constantly had the engineer forgetting that the younger man counted more than a few championship titles under his belt.)_

When Fiddleford stops for a second, Stan uses the pause to pull back and firmly hold the engineer’s face in his hands. Hot, burning tears still leaked out of Fiddleford’s eyes, and they ran into the grooves of Stan’s fingers.

“I _knew_ it, I  _knew_  you were lying,” Stan says, his voice low and excited;  _vindicated_. There’s a gleam in his gaze that just gets brighter the longer Fiddleford doesn’t interrupt. “I knew you were lying, I _knew_ it,  _I knew it--”_

Fiddleford’s hands come up and grip tightly around Stanley’s wrists; originally a move to push the brunet away, but his thumbs just press desperately onto the meat of Stan’s own.

“Stan,” The name is a hushed, weak attempt. “Stan, don’t--”

Stanley silences him with a hard, consuming kiss.

It’s an apology, it’s forgiveness, it’s a promise and an open door for home, and it  _terrifies_  down to his bones with how much Fiddleford _needs it._

Breathing is a rude necessity, but Stanley doesn’t pull his head back too far, his breath fanning out over the smaller man’s mouth as Fiddleford gulps in air like someone suffocated. Oxygen only serves to strengthen the sudden sense of attrition rolling into his chest, and soon, Fiddleford is babbling; sputtering fast about everything he’d hated himself for not doing on that night. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m not, I’m-- I didn’t mean, I didn’t--”

Stanley ducks back in, sucking a bruise to his lips before pulling him flush against his chest and moving his hands in a roaming cradle of Fidd’s lower back and his shoulders, nosing past the engineer’s collar to latch his mouth onto the soft, tender skin just below Fiddleford’s jaw.

The touch is  _electric_ , every sensation heightened by his rawed nerves, and Fiddleford tries not to crumple.

But Stan seems to understand, because he’s pulling the blond down, onto the carpet, until Fiddleford is beneath him and staring up at the bartender with wide, headlight-stunned eyes.

Stanley is a solid, beautiful bracket above him, leaning in close to Fiddleford’s face as he just openly, reverently  _looks_  at him.

Fiddleford had never felt so naked.

“I don’t want to get over you, Fidds,” Stan admitted, his voice hoarse. One of his hands comes up to stroke over Fiddleford’s hair in a loving, gentle way; a touch he’d been so badly wanting to do for the past month.

Emotion clogs the blond’s throat. It’s all Fiddleford can do to let out a wrenching sob when Stanley takes off his glasses and sets them away, on the floor; Stan’s hands coming back to quickly loosen Fiddleford’s tie and undo the buttons of his shirt.

The man’s mouth sucks hard over Fidd’s neck, stinging slightly with the feel of teeth, making the engineer yelp with slight surprise. But, the bite is laved kindly with a hot tongue. It’s the same apology given for subsequent marks, a scattering of pinpricked reds and purples that are like direct lines to Fiddleford’s arousal.

When Stan hears, and feels, the ragged moan come out of Fiddleford’s throat, he goes back to the man’s face and opens his mouth with the tip of his tongue, moving it against Fidd’s own in memory of all the ways he’d learned Fiddleford liked to be kissed. His hands go down as his weight shifts to his knees, working open Fiddleford’s slim belt with expert little jerks, pulling the leather free with a jingle, and tossing the belt to the side as his other hand turns the button loose. Stanley feels slim hands come up to his neck and shoulders, and they grip at him when he’s got a sure palm pulling Fiddleford’s cock free.

“Do you have anything,” Stan asks, breath humid over his lips; his chin dragging against Fidd’s own. The words are a question, but both know it’s a quiet, polite kind of demand.

Fiddleford swallows, gasps: “De-desk--”

Stanley unfolds to his feet in a hurry, taking the short strides over to the desk as an opportunity to shed and drop his jacket before he’s yanking out drawers, pawing through them impatiently until he finds a familiar, capped bottle.

He returns to his crouch with another hard kiss pressed to Fiddleford’s mouth, holding the smaller man down with his weight and his size. When he breaks the kiss, Stan murmurs: “Pants.”

The engineer immediately obliges, pushing adrenaline-shaky hands to his slacks and briefs and forcing them to his knees, managing to toe off his shoes so that he’s bare from the waist down; clothes piled in a messy heap behind Stanley.

Stan does the same with his jeans, watching with a hungry gaze as Fiddleford’s exposed. There’s no time wasted; the bartender hooks a hand around Fidd’s right thigh and bends the man’s leg back, shuffling forward on his knees as he flips open the lube and coats his fingers, working up to two moving within Fiddleford in record timing.

Fiddleford’s hands searched for a place to hold, and curled around into the back of Stanley’s T-shirt as he unconsciously moves, legs coming up to bracket tightly on Stan’s hips. He pants again-- he’s loud, he can’t help it. Anxiety has coupled adrenaline with emotional overwhelm, and he’s powerless to stop his noises.

The hand on Fiddleford’s side-- and now one on his hip --hold him steady, slowly but surely, until Stanley is bottoming out in Fidd’s ass.

“ _Fiddleford_.” Fiddleford whines at the sound of his own name, head pushing back against the floor as his chin tips up and a long, throaty moan leaves his open mouth. He gasps at Stanley’s first, real thrust, and the feeling is like no time has passed, like this had never stopped; the sensation of  _Rightness_  spreads through the fear like color dropping in water--

\--It’s like he’d never tried to have it killed.

One of Stanley’s hands is braced flat against the floor by their heads, his other a flat cradle against Fiddleford’s lower back; their closeness kept secure in the way the engineer hangs onto Stan, limbs greedily clinging as the bartender sets a rapid, pointed rhythm.

“I-- forgive you,” Stanley grunts, his voice strained and gravelly into Fiddleford’s ear. The brunet’s face is half-buried in Fidd’s neck and shoulder, and the feeling of Stan’s rigid glasses coupled with warm air breezing over his ear sends a frisson through Fiddleford’s skin, terminating in a toe-curling, hole-clenching squeeze that makes a guttural huskiness croak out of Stanley’s mouth, and his hips move faster.

Hard, cracked groans are dragging over Stanley’s tongue, forcing through his teeth as he repeats his mercy like an unconscious mantra against Fiddleford’s skin, gutturally, in time with the inwards thrust of his cock: “I  _forgive_ \-- you, I--  _forgive you_ ,  _I-I forgive-- you…”_

Absolution probably wasn’t supposed to sting, but the burn is welcomed inside, the open clemency selfishly snatched and coveted; even if he didn’t feel like he deserved it--  _Fiddleford **wanted**  it._

He wanted it.  
He wanted Stanley.  
He wanted to  _need_  Stanley.

The whimper that Fiddleford presses into Stan’s neck as he comes is a meek, mindless sound of surrender.

 

. . .

"He shouldn't have broken your nose," Stanley muttered.

Fiddleford traced the outline of the younger man's cheekbone with a gentle, cool metal fingertip. "This is true," he murmurs.

Stan stared back at the smaller man through calm, sleepy brown eyes. "But, you shouldn't have hit him back with a fucking brick, either."

"He  _broke_  my  _nose_ ," Fiddleford emphasized.

“Yeah, well, Stanford needed to walk with a cane for a few days,” Stanley told. “Y’were just lucky you didn’t break his kneecap.”

“Hmm.”

They’d left his study hours ago. Fidd didn’t even know what time it was, but he was beyond the point of caring. The day had been… much. If someone had tried to warn him about it when he’d first woken up this morning, Fiddleford probably would have tried to sue them for slander.

A mellow, cotton-wrapped mood had swaddled itself around his brain, pushing an exhausted peacefulness through to his fingertips; the likes of which Fiddleford doesn’t think he has ever known. (It probably had something to do with the lazy, contented expression in his lover’s eyes, and the suitably fucked-out tranquility he knew could be seen in his.)

A complete and total loss of emotional composure was a helluva thing for a deliberately repressed body to go through.

The hand stroking along his side is warm, and callused, and Fiddleford has a split-second glimmer of hindsight rage towards his past self for believing it was too intimate.

“Where d’we go from here, Fidds?” Stanley asks. His uncharacteristic dominance from the fuck on the floor is completely gone-- chalked-up in the engineer’s head to the senseless passion of the situation. But he’s not as awkward as he’s wont, Fiddleford notices; there’s a mild layer of apprehension, but largely, Stanley seems calm, receptive.

It makes his own gut tighten.

“…Stanley.” He pauses, swallows. Fiddleford’s voice doesn’t move above pillow-talk levels. “I don’t-- I don’t know how to be…” As if sensing his difficulty, Stanley wriggles closer to hold his arm around Fiddleford.

“…How to be  _good_. Like you,” the blond finishes. “I-- I don’t know how to--”

“It’s alright, Fidds,” Stan consoles, voice a comforting rumble. “Take your time, I’m not going anywhere.” The half-cuddle shifts into a real, enveloping embrace. Fiddleford’s face immediately turns and presses a cheek against Stanley’s chest hair. “I don’t care what you try’ta say to me,” the bartender swears.

That flayed, “forced wide” feeling still lingered under Fidd’s skin; hypersensitive, vigilant.

“…I don’t know how to be in love, Stanley,” the older man says. He shuts his eyes, curls his body closer. “I’ve-- I’ve never had it. Any of it. Not when I was young. There was… never any love in that house. I sure as hell didn’t get it when I became an adult,” he adds, “and then, the only folks who came ‘round just wanted my money, and--” Terror climbs up his throat. “I don’t, I don’t know  _how_  to… I don’t know how to be with someone who, who…”

The hand that moves over his temple and pets down his upper back is a strong, quiet point of support. 

Words leave him in a slightly louder, tenser confession. “Stanley, I don’t know how t’ be connected with someone for  _the someone’s_ sake, okay? I  _don’t_  know how to be loved. Not by family, not by friends, not by someone who says… says they  _want_ me, for me _._ I never learned how. I never--”

Old, ugly ghosts monopolize his headspace for a minute.

“…I was never told I deserved it,” Fiddleford said, his voice very small, and audibly shamefaced.

It’s another moment before Stan had his thoughts in order.

“Well, for starters,” the younger man begins, “when  _Stanley Pines_  tells you he loves you, Fiddleford McGucket, it’s the fuckin’ truth.” He tucks his chin to press a chaste, worshipful kiss to the top of Fiddleford’s forehead. “And I’m gon’a need you to believe it,” he adds on. “Don’t just say you do.”

The engineer privately relishes the sensation of the kiss. “Okay.”

Stanley makes a soft, satisfied noise in his throat, and noses into Fiddleford’s hair with a big, pleased sigh.

“…I’m real messed up, Stan,” Fidd warns faintly, turning his face further against the man’s chest.

“That’s alright, baby,” Stanley croons, petting a warm, tender hand over and down Fiddleford’s hair. His lips brush close to the man’s forehead again. “That’s alright.”

“I got problems, too,” the brunet says. “But, the fact you’re even tellin’ me, and the fact you’re even admitting it at all means you’re gon’a be okay.”

Fiddleford’s eyebrows tip downwards. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because,” Stan explains, like it’s the simplest thing in the world, “the only way I made it to 30 was by going into a dark place like you’re talkin’ about needin’ to go, and forcing myself to crawl back out.”

Stan closes his eyes, leans a cheek at the engineer’s crown.

“You’re gon’a be okay, Fiddleford.”

The loyalty in his tone is jarring.

“And, even if you never totally are-- I’m still gon’a love you.”

The unconditional love even more so.

Everything about this exchange is so  _foreign_ , so agreeably candid, and without a hint of stubborn snipe that Fiddleford briefly acknowledges he doesn’t recognize himself while being this honest. He had no defenses left-- something told him Stanley wouldn’t  _let_ him have any; not right now.

In a hushed, barely intelligible whisper, Fiddleford admits: “…No one’s held me like this before.”

Stanley takes a moment to internally gather himself, and swallow the immediate, knee-jerk need to break something. Instead, he combs his fingers down the back curve of Fidd’s scalp again. “Nobody?"

“Nobody.” Stan can feel the engineer’s headshake rub softly against his sternum.

“…Well, too fuckin’ bad for them, they missed out,” Stanley declares. “Because--  _heh_. You’re the perfect size to hold.”

“Are you callin’ me small?”

“Heck yes, I am. I love how small you are.”

It’s the first night in four weeks that Stanley falls asleep not feeling that frozen, hollowed feeling in his middle.

 

_. . ._

_“Goddamnit, Stanley.”_

The decision to keep his twin in the loop wasn’t turning out to be all he'd imagined.

“You need to trust me on this, Stan,” Stanley urges. He’s across from the researcher with his arms held out beside him in a cautious, placating gesture. “I know what I’m doing, okay? I do.”

They’re in the basement; Lee having found his brother covered in engine oil and elbow-deep in the bowels of that creepy machine he’d been working on. Stanford had seemed a little stressed, preoccupied, and something like a thousand miles away inside his mind as he plowed along "in the zone”.

If Lee didn’t tell him, he would find out eventually; there was no question.

But, maybe this… hadn’t been the best time.

The researcher straightens up to his full height, angrily flinging aside a crescent wrench towards the packed earthen wall; the tool sticks into the dirt like an arrow. “Do you really?” Ford demands, glaring at his twin.

“Yeah, I do,” Stanley returns, keeping his voice even. “And you got’a trust me. I  _got this.”_

“You do, huh?” The look in Ford’s eyes seems out for blood. “You’re the one who got with that scrawny horror in the first place.”

Lee feels his brow get tight. “Yeah, well, me trustin’  _you_  is what got me into that crap  _in the first place_ ,” he snaps.

“…Low blow, Lee.” Ford  _frowns_. “Low goddamn blow.”

He stomps away to the wall, yanking out his wrench and side-stepping the little flume of dirt that falls to the floor.

Immediately, Stanley’s shoulders slump, and he sighs out a breath that vents off the uppermost, feistier layer of his confidence.

“I know, look, I’m sorry,” he apologizes, following his brother to a nearby bench. “I know, that was a cheap shot.” Ford’s grabbed up a towel and he kept wiping his hands as Lee sat beside him. “But… We really connected, Ford,” the boxer insists. “I promise, I’m not just tryin’ to pretend it; we’re on a whole ‘nother level, it’s  _nothing_  like before.”

Stanford pretends not to listen, but Lee knows his insane level of sibling empathy prevented him from ever completely tuning out his twin.

Stanley looks down at his hands. “I feel like I’m finally with the person behind the name, y’know?”

“…Lee.” Ford says his name in a heavy, rigid tone. “I want to believe you. I  _do_ , look. But, shit--” The researcher makes another hard frown, staring out at his incomplete machine. “Forgive me if I’m a little hesitant, okay?” He says. “Man, I don’t think you realize just how much… How much it fuckin’  _broke me_  to see  _you_  get so broken by that guy, alright?”

Ford turns, catches his twin’s eyes. The resolute set to his features is an unsettling breed of naked, unforgiving honesty. “I wanted him dead, Stanley,” Stanford tells. “I wanted him  _dead_  for how he hurt you.”

The most he can do is work his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I know, bro.”

“I hope you do.” Ford looks at his own hands, balling up the handtowel. “…So,” he licks his lips. “So,  _forgive me_  if I’m not-- If I’m not exactly  _supportive_  of this, okay? I’m gon’a… I’m gon’a need some time.” A roll passes through his shoulders as he breathes out through his nose. “Shit, I’m not sure I’ll ever get over it-- But.”  
  
Stanley paused. Eventually, he blew out a weighted sigh, and seemed to settle back into his seat. He nodded. “Okay, Stanford. I get it.”

Ford purses his lips. For a moment, Stanley thinks he looks all of sixteen; insecure, frustrated, angrily aware of his limitations. “You be careful, Stan,” his brother warns.

“I know what I’m doing, my brother. I know exactly what I’m doing.” Lee swings back up to his feet, and stuffs his hands in his pockets. “This time, I’m  _not_  gon’a let Fiddleford hide behind whatever… Whatever bullshit he’s been using to keep people away. I pushed him through it, and I’m going to keep him on the other side of that crap.”

Stanley toes his shoe against a lump of earth, watching as the soil broke and crumbled.

“He hurt me, and you hate that.” The boxer’s voice is low. “I get it, dude. But I found out why, and I saw the man behind all of that shit-- He didn’t let me. I had to drag him out, so to speak.”

When he looks up again, Stanley finds he’s being watched by his brother.

He can almost hear junebugs and smell cigarette smoke as he says his next words. 

“I’ve got this, Ford. I promise.”

 

. .::. .

 

For the past week, he’d been toying with the idea of sending a representative proxy to the conference this year. Because, knowing Stan, the brunet would be  _upset_  if Fiddleford told him he was supposed to be flying to New York, and spending the winter holidays in a hotel. The engineer had a suspicion that Stanley would probably be expecting to participate in the social significance of mutually celebrating Christmas, or Chanukah together; what with the renewal attempting to take proper root between them.

And, because… That’s where they were, now. At least, it’s where he knew they were heading: becoming a legitimate  _They_. The present nature of their relationship was a  _return_ , at its foundation, but a sense of unrelated, evolved  _difference_  filled the body of their bond and directed how they came together. They were the same people, but their approaches towards one another were coming from naked places; places non-negotiably forbidden to allow art, or pretense.

It was making Fiddleford actively attempt to be  _better_.

But, it was-- difficult, to put it lightly.

He’d awoken each morning in the past week with his first thoughts immediately gravitating to orbit that new, unsettling locus of hyperaware, inwards attention. Fidd felt a lot like there was a long-neglected part of him that had finally been allowed to open its eyes, and now the damn thing refused to let anything go. He was holding himself accountable for every awful, toxic interpersonal habit he’d been relying on for the past three decades, and that unblinking, all-knowing metaphorical eye was forcing him to acknowledge himself in a way he’d always been too terrified to try and do sober.

The experience of the forced emotional descent of last Friday had remained with Fiddleford, despite the gradual return of his singular level of cultivated poise and confident nerve. A core of genuine, uncomfortable  _humility_  had plunged deep, like a bracing beam, and had remained unmoved even as the days wore on and his personality attached itself around this new, steadfast guideline. Fiddleford was left with no other option than to try and let himself become something closer to whatever innate  _Goodness_  it was that Stanley Pines seemed to effortlessly exude, because the alternative was too maddening to envision.

And, in the midst of all of this, he was wondering if he should buy a goddamned menorah.

Business at the MGL headquarters had been humming away where he had directed it, like a well-oiled, self-sustaining machine turned loose. The lower, supporting factions of his company were busy with their set goals, and required no higher-level micromanaging outside of the faceless bureaucrats who touched base with their project managers. Preparations for the December showcase were currently functioning so independently that he didn’t even need to show up to work at all.

Fiddleford had been indulging the temporary freedom to muck about with his latest robotic concepts, and clear out some of the outstanding files sitting in his Inbox. Outside of seeing Stanley in the evenings, Fidd spent the afternoons contentedly ensconced within his study; away from anyone or anything which could possibly ruin his productive atmosphere. On days like this, even the Manor help knew to leave him be.

Which meant that  _no one_  should be calling his study.

The engineer stared at the black rotary. The telephone had sat on the distant corner of his desk since he’d had the room furnished, and it never rung. It wasn’t  _supposed_  to ring; not since he’d threatened Victoria that if she called the direct, private line for his study requesting his opinion on meaningless Manor minutia  _one more goddamned time_ , he’d cipher-protect access to their bank account and put her on an allowance. Vicky cared about a limited few things in this world, and one of them was her unfettered access to her lawfully-wedded meal ticket. She’d stopped calling his study about five years back, and Fiddleford knew the woman honestly wasn’t dumb enough to allow herself to get so bored as to suddenly start up again.

When the shrill ringing didn’t stop, Fiddleford leaned over and snatched the telephone from the cradle, bringing it up to his ear.

“Who is this?” He demanded into the receiver. “How’d you get this number?”

 _“From your wife,”_  a familiar voice spat.  _“I’m not exactly thrilled about talkin’ to you, either, you know. But-- Look, just. You need to get your ass to the hospital, McGucket. Right now.”_

“ _Excuse_  me?” Fiddleford demanded, eyebrows furrowing as his mind tried to place an identity to the deep, masculine tenor. He started firing out more questions to distract his unconscious as it thought: “Who in the shit d’you think you are, tellin’ me where’da go? Why’d Victoria give you this number? Who are you?”

 _“God, I shouldn’t have even--”_  The voice sounded strained, tight, like it was losing all of its (possibly very short) amount of patience. _“--Look, fuck you, you menuval trash. I don’t care if you don’t show. But he will, and I-- I fuckin’ promised I’d trust him, alright--”_

“Spit it out, dumbass,” Fiddleford snapped, responding to the palpable tension coming through the line.

 _“Get to the goddamned hospital, because Lee’s been in an accident,”_  the voice ordered.

“Wait,” he drawls, echoing: _“‘Lee…?”_

Synapses fire like carnival lights in his brain, burning a circuit to the right association that suddenly lit up with bright, implosive horror.

“…What kind of accident,” Fiddleford asks, his voice having gone reflexively impassive.

 _"Wiped out on the ice. Totaled his bike. He hit a car,”_  Stanford Pines recited, tone even and tense.

Panic is like a screech inside Fiddleford’s head.

_“Just fucking get here, McGucket. Or don’t. I’m not callin’ again.”_

The strident beeping of an empty phoneline is all he can process for long moments.

 

. .::. .

 

He finds the taller scientist sitting in the empty waiting room right inside the ER bay doors.

“How long has he been here?”

“Almost three hours,” Stanford answered. His voice was flat. He was leaning forward on his knees, and he was staring at a pair of broken, blood-flecked glasses in between his hands--

Fiddleford felt icewater pour into his veins when he realized they were Stanley’s glasses.

Disbelief crows with rage in his chest. “You didn’t call me ‘til  _just now?”_  The engineer queried, quickly growing furious.

“…Oh,  _I am saw-ree,”_  Stanford said, mocking Fiddleford’s drawl as he stood from his seat; his brother’s glasses slipping into his coat pocket.

Cheryl warbled something hesitant and cautious from the chair next to him, but the researcher ignored her. His sole focus was on the engineer. “I’m sorry,” Stanford repeated. “I guess I didn’t think callin’ and telling the duplicitous, emotionally-constipated  _asshole_  who treated my brother like a toy was  _that high_  of a fucking priority, y’know, seeing how Stanley’s  _safety_  and  _health_  were on the fucking line-- But you don’t care about that shit, now do you, McGucket?”

“I’m not doing this here, Pines,” Fiddleford calmly told. Still, his hands curled into fists by his side.

“Yeah, sure,” Stanford threw back. “Because the  _last time_  we did this, I broke your nose, remember?”

“I would have broken yours,” Fiddleford countered, “had the thought of knockin’ your fat ass to the ground by a brick to the knees not been so appealin’.” A nasty little smirk quirked up his thin lips. This was well-trod territory, this bantering hatred. Fiddleford clung to it like a life raft. “How’s that limp, by the way?” he asked. “Might need that dumb eight-ball cane a bit longer than you thought, huh?”

_“Oh, fuck you!”_

“Stanford!” Cheryl snapped, getting to her feet.

A couple of nurses from the control desk craned their necks around to look over at them. If they kept this up, Cheryl worried, they might be forced to leave. And, Stanford would never forgive himself if something were to happen to Stanley’s condition while he wasn’t here.

But, the thought of McGucket was enough to make Stanford feel sour all over, nowadays, so getting a face-full of the pompous engineer’s trademark snipe made him see red. “I swear,” the twin roared, “Cheryl, this guy--” Stanford shook a meaty finger at the inventor. “--This…  _paskudnyak_ \-- God, I don’t trust you as far as I could throw you, McGucket; I don’t care what Stanley said you told him--”

“That’s fine,” Fiddleford interrupted, voice going high in order to talk over Stanford, “because I could literally  _not care_  about your opinion on our relationship--”

“Are you  _for real--?!”_

“Mr Pines?”

Both stopped at sound of a new voice. It was an approaching doctor: white-coated, professionally dressed, carrying a metal chart with a big red ER stickered to the back.  _‘The senior resident,’_  Fiddleford assumed.

Stanford nodded at the doctor, all billowing anger for the argument suddenly gone and replaced with fretful concern. “Yeah, that’s me, what’s the news?”

 _“How is he?”_  Fiddleford demanded, still bristled. He stepped in front of Stanford just enough to monopolize the doctor’s focus, feeling (and  _ignoring_ ) the dark glower of the twin’s gaze.

Fiddleford did not care. “Stanley Pines,” he continued, speaking fast, “the motorcyclist, the one from the wreck by the mall--  _how is he?”_

Whether from the cold intent in Fiddleford’s eyes, or from simple experience, the doctor didn’t dither with his answer. “He’s still very critical,” he told. “We managed to keep him stable during the transportation from the ambulance to the ER, but he started to code. The trauma he sustained was too severe for triage, so we rushed him into surgery.”

“Shit,” Stanford breathed. Cheryl pressed her fingers to her mouth with a small whimper, wrapping a tight arm around Stanford’s back.

Fiddleford didn’t look at them.

As the attending had been speaking, another doctor had come from the adjacent hall and was walking towards them. His green gloves were bloody, and left red smears on his aerator mask as he pulled it down from his mouth. He stopped a few feet away, peeling off his gloves into a wad inside his mask and dropping it into a nearby bin labeled with a “biohazard” sticker. He stood to the side of their small cluster, obviously waiting for his colleague to finish.

The sight of those gloves had made a silent sensation of screaming fear return to the engineer’s stomach.

“How,” Stanford paused, licking his lips; not noticing the newcomer. “How is he now? Y-you’re, I mean, you’re taking  _care_  of him, right? This is a hospital, you’ve got  _people_  in there who can, who can--”

Fiddleford cut in again, shifting deliberately to speak out to the waiting doctor. “Your surgeons know what they’re doin’, I assume?”

He threw a quick look back at Stanford, and saw a short-lived flicker of surprised gratitude pass over the researcher’s face as the researcher caught Fiddleford’s eyes, before the color drained from Stanford’s cheeks as he saw the second doctor.

The new doctor came closer as the first continued to glance between Stanford and Fiddleford, his young face bent into a practiced expression of bleak sympathy.

But Fiddleford noticed the surgeon didn’t even try to shift his expression.

“We’re worried about him going into shock,” the older doctor explained, his deep voice calm yet obviously tired. “And about possible nerve damage. The patient’s heart is beating irregularly. The skull fracture he sustained isn’t helping, either; that’s creating some swelling we’re having to keep an eye on. We’ve got an orthopedic surgeon currently setting his bones; there’s been some fracturing. We’ve also got him hooked up to fluids and hung a bag of blood, but he’s been hurt pretty bad. There’s no simple answer to give you right now.”

Fiddleford’s mind latched onto a small part of the surgeon’s speech, feeling a dreadful foreboding like something else wasn’t being said. “His heart,” he snapped. “What’s,  _why_  is that an issue? Why haven’t you gotten that stabilized?” A tightness twisted within Fiddleford’s chest-- apprehension for learning there might be another horrible layer to this nightmare.

“We did,” the surgeon assured, “but the sheer force of the wreck on his body, and the multiple-system trauma has stressed the muscle’s rhythm. His heart  _did_  stop--”

Fiddleford sucked in a short breath without meaning to. “Sonofabitch.”

“--Once,” the surgeon continued, “and we brought him back around to sinus rhythm, but the regularity was temporary. We’re worried about another attack. We’ve got excellent doctors working in there, sir, but Mr Pines has been severely injured. Two of his ribs punctured his liver and helped collapse a lung, and we’re trying to keep him stitched up and stable just long enough to see where we’ll need to go next.”

Stanford audibly swallowed, removing his glasses so he could rub one of his large hands over his face, pinching at the bridge of his nose as he squeezed his eyes shut. Cheryl reflexively patted circles on his back, murmuring sounds of worried, half-soothing nonsense.

But Fiddleford hadn’t moved. He’d been left with thinner skin, after this past week; a sensitive kind of nervous, still reeling inside as he tried to fit with his new, proverbially-turned leaf.

Something was not right.

“What do you mean,” he began, each word curt and deliberate, _“‘where you’ll need to go next’?”_

The older doctor seemed hesitant.

“…This is a very delicate situation,” he said, slowly. “And your friend’s been hurt bad. Sometimes, the most we can do still isn’t enough to save someone. We’re  _trying_ , I promise you, but--” He paused, and then he spread his gloved hands a bit within the space between them. A relinquishing, powerless gesture. “--Sometimes, all we can do it leave it up to fate.”

“That is not an option,” came the immediate retort. The cold fury in Fiddleford’s tone left no room for argument.

“McGucket,” Stanford tried, placing a strangely gentle hand on one of the engineer’s shoulders. The situation had made the bigger man kind, like someone too shaken by the present to think of keeping attention an old grudge.

But Fiddleford wasn’t like him. Fiddleford hadn’t allowed himself the luxury of properly  _feeling_  in a long, long time. The pattern of the past few days had still been too new, too raw to yet be his default.

He shrugged off Stanford’s touch and took an absent step closer to the doctors. 

The past week had been a parade of stress and challenge, but  _this_ \-- This was too much.

He’d just gotten Stanley back. He’d just accepted his need to change.

_He’d just gotten Stanley back._

“Look at you. You look  _resigned_ ,” Fiddleford snapped, glaring into the surgeon’s face. His voice was a vicious hiss; that special, horrible patter of hot venom normally reserved for eliminating a competitor. “Why are  _you_  in there?  _Why_  were you even on call at all, hmm? How many years did you go to medical school-- Eight? Twelve? And how long did you spend specializin’; another three?”

He shot his questions fast, and loud, steadily moving closer to the older doctor as he got  _louder_ , rage making him bolder,  _meaner_. This wasn’t just anxiety and fear motivating his silver tongue to cut quick and deep, as he was wont-- This was reckless, verging on desperate; the worst kind of defensive anger.

This was a man finally giving vent to one hell of a belated breakdown.

The other doctor made a motion to shift between them, but Fiddleford’s reflexes were better.

He side-stepped the younger man to stab a hard, angry fingertip against the surgeon’s chest.

“Mr McGucket--” the attending squawked.

“Damn near  _two decades_  working to become a doctor,” Fiddleford yelled, “and you’re tellin’ me to  _just sit pretty_  with your educated decision to leave this shit up to fate? Fate? Fuckin’  _fate??”_

A clatter of laughter left his mouth, loud and wild. “Do I look stupid to you? Does _this man_  look stupid, too?!” He threw a wide gesture towards Stanford, swinging the same arm back through the arc to push at the doctor’s chest again. “Don’t you know who I am?! I ain’t donated damn near the value of this whole entire state to this little ol’ institution to wind up gettin’ told the best y’all got  _is a fuckin’ prayer._ I practically built this hospital! I made this town! I deserve the best! Everything I have, everythin’ I ever wanted is always the best!” He babbled. “And Stanley is  _mine_ \-- He  _deserves_ the best!”

Stanford tugged at Fiddleford’s shoulders and said something, but the slighter scientist was beyond being reached.

“I am  _not_  gon’a let you give up on him,” Fiddleford thundered, giving the surgeon a surprisingly strong shake. “You are goin’ to do everythin’ you can to save Stanley Pines.”

“Sir, we  _are_ , I promise you,” the surgeon insisted.

Fiddleford gave a harsh growl and tried to shake him again, but the younger doctor pulled on his arm, offering: “Sometimes patients just die, Mr McGucket! Medicine isn’t perfect! We  _are_  skilled, but we’re not magicians!”

_‘Sometimes patients die.’_

Fiddleford went still.

“Sir…” The surgeon slowly pulled his shirt from the now-unmoving other man.

Fiddleford had his head turned; staring at the first doctor, unblinking.

_‘Sometimes patients die.’_

He made a sound like a creature possessed and threw a hard fist into the attending’s jaw.

**_‘How dare they try to take him from me?’_ **

The man stumbled backwards and landed with a solid  _THUD_  on the linoleum, instantly bringing a hand up to cover his split lip. There were a few scattered gasps from the small audience that had gathered, and a couple of nurses rushed over to their injured colleague as Cheryl yelled:  _“Stanford, do something!”_  
  
Stanford tried to grab Fiddleford but the slender man wriggled almost immediately out of the clumsy grip, and he lunged for the surgeon-- Fiddleford’s short fingers, turned vise-like from rage, curled into the surgeon’s scrubs and clenched dangerously as he shook the man with an incensed vigor.

 _“I WILL DESTROY YOU, D’YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!”_ His face was close to the doctor’s own, and he screamed without concern. The surgeon, wide-eyed with terror, tried to pry him off.

Fiddleford kept pressing them forward, mindlessly moving closer to the waiting room wall. “If you don’t make him well,” he swore, “I’ll _ruin_  you, I will  _ruin you--”_

“Jesus, Fiddleford,  _stop_ \--” Stanford went to pull at the engineer again, but Fiddleford closed the short distance to the wall and slammed the surgeon against it. “NO! No, I will  _not stop_ ,” he yelled, “I want this fool to know--” He pulled the doctor up just enough to slam him back against the wall. “That I can and  _will_  make it so not a damned one of you or your team ever gets to practice medicine ever again in this country! Do you understand me? I will destroy you!  _I will goddamned destroy you!”_

Rage settled Fiddleford into a rhythm of hitting the doctor against the wall and of tensing away from Stanford’s attempts to pry them apart.

When you’re born poor, small, and  _different_ , in a place where the most popular options are fight or die, a child learns quickly how to avoid bigger, stronger enemies. His body was moving on autopilot; long-buried instincts clawing their way back into his limbs and rearing their ugly, bitter heads to piston through his skin the kind of fury that once kept him alive, once pushed him from that hellhole, pushed him to these heights, pushed him into wealth and power--

\--and probably wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to save Stanley.

“I’ll buy this hospital and burn it to the ground with you inside!” Fiddleford screamed, shaking the doctor in earnest. “I’ll sue y’all off the face of the damned planet if you--”  _SLAM_. “--DON’T--”  _SLAM_. “--SAVE--”  _SLAM_. “--HIM!”

_“FIDDLEFORD!”_

“Mr McGucket!”

New hands were pulling at him now. Someone had called security-- the officers successfully wrenched the scientist away from the now coughing, pale-faced surgeon.

A nurse came over and helped lower the doctor into a chair. There was a dusted spot of red on the wall where the back of the surgeon’s head had been hitting, and the nurse pressed a clean square of cotton to the man’s scalp.

Fiddleford stared at them for a beat, before someone firmly gripped his upper arm. “Sir, you’re going to have to come with us,” one of the officers said, but Fiddleford snatched away from him, anxiety instantly returning as he rebuked: “No! I can’t leave!”

“You just assaulted--” the guard started, but Fiddleford backed away from them, horse-spooked and cagey. “I can’t leave!” he yelled. “I can’t leave!”

“Sir, please,” Stanford turned to the closest security guard, “it’s been a  _really_  bad day; my brother is in surgery, we’re all a little on edge…”

The surgeon was led away from the waiting room, and the security guard watched them go with a frown. “I don’t care what’s happened, that was  _definitely_  breaking some kind of law,” he told, pointing a blunt finger where they’d gone. “I’m filin’ a report.”

“Do what you need to do,” Stanford placated, glancing over at Fiddleford’s quiet, panicked breakdown as he spoke. “Just-- I  _know_  this looks bad, but, I swear,” Stanford urged. “It won’t happen again.”

A snort. And then the security guard was eyeballing Stanford with a shrewd, sharp gaze. “You’re a big guy,” he stated, apropos of nothing. “Next time, and I mean this-- Keep a handle on that little one, or y’all are  _all_  getting arrested. I don’t care who you’re waiting on in surgery.”

“ _Absolutely_ , will do,” the researcher promised, nodding fast. “I can guarantee, that _won’t_ \-- I’ll, I’ll watch him.”  
  
“All that screamin’ only upsets people,” the guard muttered. Stanford chattered something acquiescent and agreeing, and eventually, the security guard walked away.

Stanford watched him go until the uniform was out of sight. He pushed an adrenaline-jittery hand through his hair, blowing out a deep breath as he sagged in place.  
  
“…Holy fuck,” Cheryl stated.  
  
“You can say that again,” Stanford muttered.  
  
How the  _shit_  was he supposed to know McGucket fought like fucking hillbilly?

He turned around, opening his mouth to begin speaking to the engineer, but the words died in his throat.

Fiddleford had slumped forward in an empty chair, his face pressed into his knees as his arms curled weakly around the back of his head and neck. His shoulders visibly quaked, and soft, muffled sobs trickled out from around his elbows. Whatever wellspring of fury that had been buoying him throughout that brief horror show seemed absolutely tapped, leaving behind a deflated, pitiable shadow of the man.

Stanford sighed.

 

. . .

Late evening saw them still in the waiting room; exhausted, impatient, powerless to hurry the indifferent drag of time.

Stanley survived the surgery. They got his heart back to normal rhythm. His body was accepting the blood transfusion, and he was cleared for recovery.

Or, at least, he  _would be_ , had his last flatline not left him comatose.

The same attending from before returned to the ER a little after eight; his cheek a ruddy, tender purple, but his eyes were kind when they met Fiddleford’s own. He passed a clipboard to Stanford, and Fiddleford absently registered their hushed, one-sided conversation: Stanley could breathe independently; a good sign. He was ready to be moved into a room. They were ready to start a chart and a file for him. But, they needed his insurance-- or he couldn’t stay.

Stanford’s voice was a distressed choke: “No, we… he doesn’t-- A-Are you seriously gon’a kick him out if he can’t  _pay--?”_

Fiddleford stood and didn’t speak as he pulled the clipboard from the twin’s hand. He was muted as he filled out the paperwork with his own information.

No one dared to stop him.

Nurses met them on the next floor, in a wing set specifically for intensive care. They were pushing Stan’s (cleaned) gurney from the operating theater, and Fiddleford watched through the chicken wire glass of the patient-room window as they worked together to shift the unconscious bartender onto what would now be his bed. The gurney was wheeled out to make room for complicated, clinical machines pulled close, the nurses moving in well-trained precision as they unwound fresh IV lines, uncapped new needles, tightened the adjusted heights on the monitors. Stanley was poked, and taped, and attached to more tubes than Fiddleford thought he could stomach seeing, but he refused to leave.

He forced himself to stare.

He didn’t--  _couldn’t_  go into the room, at first. It didn’t take long for the nurses to get Stan settled, and his brother and sister-in-law quickly took up vigil on the far bedside during those first couple of hours, but Fiddleford--

The whole of his universe was rapidly shrinking, localizing onto the length and breadth of Stanley Pines, and it terrified Fiddleford to _not know_  if this was the way it was going to end. Here, in this awful place; this clinical, somber corner of hell, reeking of disinfectant and coated in an unshakable, fine layer of dread.

It terrified him to suddenly understand the sensation of fearing the possible loss of another human being.

Stanford caught his attention with a sigh, sometime after morning. The engineer had taken a seat in the one chair placed outside Stanley’s room, and had been privately fighting the pull of sleep.

“McGucket-- Fiddleford.” The younger scientist faltered, dragging a tired hand down his stubbled cheek. In absence, Fiddleford registered how so much more like his twin he now looked, like this. The thought made the engineer’s throat get tight.

“Fiddleford… Just, just stop standing out here,” Stanford said. He gestured vaguely towards the interior of the room. “I’m not, you know, thrilled about… you,” the brunet admitted. “But-- I was  _born_  with Stanley, he’s my only sibling, and even  _I_  didn’t try to bash a stranger’s fuckin’ head in when I heard there wasn’t a guarantee he would make it.”

Fiddleford sat in the chair, staring up at Stanford; his eyes headlight-frozen, every inch of his skin feeling taut and nervous.

It must have shown on his face, because Stanford was sighing again, pulling off his glasses to pinch at his nose. “Look, all’s I know is… Stanley’s crazy about you, and you’re probably  _just_  crazy. But…” He put his glasses back on, pushing them up his nose in a mindless, one-fingered habit that was an echo to his brother. “I think you care,” Stanford admitted. “Like, enough to murder someone because they scared you about losing Stan.”

The open, six-fingered hand that is extended to Fiddleford is as much of a peace offering as the engineer knew he would ever get from this man.

“Come on,” Stanford said. “Bring that chair in.”

Fiddleford damn near doesn’t move from where he places it beside Stanley’s bed.

 

. .::. .

 

The weak, ragged groan that cut through the quiet beeping in the room was like hearing birdsong.

“Stanley…?” Fiddleford felt his breath catch in his throat. Stanford had stepped out with his wife to refill on coffee, and Fiddleford had been left to thumb through a back issue of National Geographic as he waited.

His eyes sprung wide when that handsome, bruised brow wrinkled into a frown, and Stan started to slowly stir awake. “ _Stanley_.”

“Ugh… Fidd…?” The brunet’s voice is cracked from disuse. “My head--”

Fiddleford shot out of his seat and ran to the doorway, screaming into the hall:  _“Someone better get in here right now! He’s wakin’ up!”_

The next minute is a flurry of activity. A severe-looking doctor rushed in with Stanford following close behind her; trailed by Cheryl, and a nurse.

The nurse grabbed the patient chart from the foot of the bed and then politely nudged Fiddleford away from the bedside as the doctor leaned in over Stanley’s chest, shining a light in Stan’s squinting eyes. “Mr Pines?” She questioned, expertly avoiding the limp, irritated waving of one of the bartender’s hands. “Can you tell me your name, sir?”

There’s a weak grunt of annoyance as Stanley blinks when the light is taken away. “You just said it,” he gripes.

Stanford makes a short, exasperated sigh as Fiddleford yelped an involuntary laugh. “Humor the lady, Stanley,” the researcher orders.

“Stanley Pines,” the man answers. He’s still frowning when one of his hands touches curious, bewildered fingers to the bandages on his temple. “What’s all this crap?”

“How old are you?” The doctor demands. “Do you know the year? Can you tell me the name of the president?”

Stan ignores her. His face was starting to look strained. “Can I get something for my head, please?”

“Lee, answer the questions,” Stanford repeats.

His twin obliges, rattling off the correct responses as the doctor presses a stethoscope to Stanley’s chest. She pulls back after a few seconds, murmuring to the nurse, who writes something down onto Stanley’s chart.

“Very good,” the doctor announces. She rounds to the end of the bed and folds back the covers to expose Stan’s feet. “Can you feel this?” A firm, blunt needle is pricked on the ball of his left foot, and Stanley shouts as he flinches: “ _Yeow!_  What the hell?!”

She pricks his right foot. “And this one?”

“God, yes, I feel it,” Stanley answers, “I can feel  _everything_ , shit.”

“Do you recognize the people in this room?”

There was a frustrated, pained exhale. “I can’t see crap without my glasses, lady,” the bartender groused.

Stanford stepped forward, unfolding a new pair of black framed glasses from a plastic oyster case. He pinched the bridge between the lenses, and angled them down onto his twin’s nose; one of Stanley’s hands instinctively coming up to adjust their perch on his ears with a shaking pair of fingers.

The brunet licked over his dry lips for a second, blinking out at the room.

“…That’s my brother. Stanford,” he said, head tilted towards the smiling, watery-eyed researcher. Stan’s eyes moved down to the weeping woman glued to Stanford’s side. “That’s his better half, Cheryl.”

“ _HAH!”_  The laugh is an explosive, hideous thing that brays out of Cheryl, and Stanford can’t help the relieved snort that escapes him, pressing a fist over his uncontrollable grin.

A brief bow of a smile tilts up Stan’s own mouth, before his gaze falls to his right, his head moving with the direction.

“And, that’s my--” Stanley licks his lips, swallowing. His eyes softened. “…That’s my Fiddleford.”

Fiddleford nearly forgot to breathe; his eyes wide and red-rimmed, his hands pressed to his mouth.

“Well, he passes so far,” the doctor stated, turning the blanket back down. She waved out the nurse, and then grasped her hands at the ends of her stethoscope where it hung around her neck. “Mr Pines, you were in a bad car accident on your motorcycle,” she explained. “You’ve been here at the hospital for four days. You’ve been in a coma.”

Stanley’s eyes shift from Fiddleford onto the doctor. “…Fuck,” he opines intelligently.

“You broke some bones and bruised some organs, but we’ve fixed you right up,” she adds. “Though, don’t worry if some places hurt more than others.”

“…I broke my leg?” The question is mystified, and Stanley’s eyebrows raise when he finally realizes the unfamiliar weight of a plaster cast below his left knee.

“I’m afraid so. Your ribs are also a bit of a mess, and you scraped up your face pretty good. We’re going to keep you here until your stitches are ready to come out, because we’re concerned about your heart. You gave the surgeons a time when your ticker kept stopping, but, we feel confident it was only situational; not leading to something long-term.” She paused, analyzing Stan’s nonplused, pinched expression. “How are you taking this? Do you need me to repeat anything?”

The brunet makes a listless shake of his head. “Can I get somethin’ for… everything?” His voice sounded uncomfortable. “I mean, uh. It’s all… really startin’ to hurt.”

“I’ll go harass a nurse,” Cheryl offered, swanning out towards the nurse’s station. With a glance to the woman’s exit, the doctor patted Stan’s unbroken leg with a promise to check on him later that evening, and then she left, too.

Stanley looked over at his brother. Stanford was still grinning. “I’m callin’ Pop,” he suddenly announced, thumbing away tears from the corners of his eyes as he followed his wife.

Fiddleford is the only other one left in the room.

When the engineer started to move back into his seat beside Stan’s bed, the bartender found himself staring. “…I like that you’re here, too,” Stanley told, in a low voice.

The engineer is caught off-guard for a second. “Why the sweet christ  _wouldn’t_  I be?” Fiddleford asked, incredulous. He sits down, feeling suddenly vulnerable. “Stanley…” Fidd wrapped his hands around Stan’s right one, his grip mindful of the IV port taped onto the back. “I was so scared. I was  _so scared_ ,  _Stanley_ , I--” Fiddleford chewed a spot on his lower lip. “I wasn’t ready to lose you. I’m not.”

“That’s good.”

“I know,” Fidd tells. His grip clenched tighter. “Stanley.”

The brunet responded to the touch with a gentle curl of his fingers. “Yeah?”

Fiddleford felt sick; hot all over. The week was finally catching up with him.

“…Stanley, I-- I’m so sorry,” he whimpered, as his eyes started to overflow. “I’m so sorry, I’m-- I love you _, I love you_ , and I’m--”

“Hey, no,” Stan pulled his hand free to try and cup at Fidd’s face. “Baby, no,  _shhh_ ; it’s okay, I’m okay--”

He leaned forward, forehead bumping against Stan’s blanketed hip as he cried. Maybe it was the speed of things, the remorseless progression of events, but Fiddleford felt finished. There was nowhere else to go, after swinging this far down. There was nothing he could possibly do except--

Start again.

The heavy rest of Stanley’s hand over the back of his head was like a benediction.

“I love you, I love you, I love you…”

He felt like he could finally deserve Stanley’s forgiveness.

 

. .::. .

 

Fiddleford had done all but move into Stanley’s hospital room.

Once the bartender had been released from ICU, Fiddleford had reasoned with (see: bullied) the Dean of Medicine into making sure a one _Stanley Pines: rehab patient_  was to be transferred into the best private room available. And when that floor’s attending tried to chastise a(n equally intimated) nurse for installing a temporary cot in the empty space beside Stan’s hospital bed, Fiddleford had calmly crossed the room, opened his chequebook, and wrote out a donation for Gravity Falls Medical so immense that the Dean had had to call an immediate staff assembly to make sure everyone was on the same page: _“For the love of all that is holy, you let that little man stay as close as he needs to that patient.”_

And there, Fiddleford had remained.

Stanley’s strength was slowly returning, and with it, his strength to complain.

“I can’t friggin’ stand this bed,” he griped, frowning at the nurse who was changing his bandages. “Everything  _always hurts_ , but not bein’ able to move makes it worse,” he finished.

“They’re gon’a up your dosage for narcotics,” Fidd told, unpacking fresh gauze and handing it off to the nurse. “Since your lungs’re doin’ better.”

Stan did a jaw-dropped groan at the ceiling. “Thank  _fuck_.”

“Boy, watch your language,” the nurse chided, snipping cotton tape from the roll Fiddleford held out for her.

“Get me some drugs, lady, and I’ll be speakin’ squeaky-clean,” Stanley wheedled.

The sound that the nurse makes is bluntly unimpressed. “Burn dressing first,” she compromised, “ _then_  you can get loaded.”

Stanley moved his head over to look up into Fiddleford’s amused face. “I can live with that,” the bartender grinned.  
  
When he’d first taken up roost here, Fiddleford had insisted that he be present for every mundane procedure required for Stanley’s daily care. When the nurses had figured out that it was easier for them to have an extra set of eager, intelligent hands ready to help them with keeping clean a heavy, attention-wandering patient like Stanley Pines than it was to try and pull rank, the arguing (and the shameless threats to make their lives hell) stopped immediately.

Now, Fiddleford could find his way around a basic triage kit practically with his eyes closed, and the nurses on this floor had one less patient to handle alone.

“Stanley,” Fidd said.

The bartender was watching the nurse restick his bandages. “Huh?”

“The day of your accident,” Fiddleford began, “Stanford called me some name I didn’t recognize.” He leaned against the plastic railing on the side of the bed, trying to remember. “Pash… Pad-something.”

Stanley glances up. “ _Paskudnyak_?”

“That’s it.”

“Whoa,  _that_  was rude,” the bartender murmurs. His right hand scratches at his freshly-shaven cheek. “He must’a been pissed. Lee barely never speaks Yiddish.”

“Mm, well,” Fiddleford shrugs slightly. “It was a-- stressful day.”

“Done,” the nurse announces, pulling Stanley’s gown back over his middle. She starts to pull off her gloves as she rounds the bed for the door. “I’m-a go get your drugs, hon.”

Stanley claps and shouts: "THANK YOU!"

 

. . .

“Hey, Fidds…”

The engineer adjusted the pillow of his head on his folded arms, turning his face up to his lover. Stan’s painkiller-heavy hand tried to adjust the set of his glasses for him, but Fiddleford stopped the uncoordinated pawing by gently winding his hands around the broad palm, holding it. “Mm?” He poked out a thumb to push up his glasses as he watched Stanley watch him.

The brunet muzzily stared at him for a long moment. “…Hey,” Stanley repeated.

Fiddleford leaned his cheek against his forearm. “Hey.”

“I wanted to ask you somethin’, buuut… I’m kind of stoned, now.”

The nurse had come and gone again with Stanley’s painkillers a little over half an hour ago. “I can see that,” Fidd says.

Stan’s brow suddenly knitted, and his expression got deliberately, consciously serious. “You’re so fuckin’ cute,” he accused.

The older man couldn’t help his amused smirk. “Were you tryna ask me if I knew that, already?”

“You’re such a bitch.”

Fiddleford smiled.

“No, I wanted…” Stanley’s “serious” expression melted away, back into the smooth, peaceful drift of narcotic high as he looked up at the ceiling. “I wanted to ask you if… Like.” His head rolled back over to look at Fiddleford. “You remember when we first got together?”

There’s a mild squeezing around Stan’s hand. “Fondly.”

The bartender tried to return the dexterity, but his fingers felt too dumb. All he could manage was a limp clamping. “Yeah, well…” He began. “Back then… how you acted…”

Fiddleford’s chest unconsciously went tighter, and he felt himself swallow in a sudden flash of nerves. He blinked, adjusted his dual grip around Stanley’s big hand. “Yeah?”

Stanley seemed fascinated by the strong hold he feels Fidd make around his weakened palm, and his eyes kept trailing over the grooves of both the engineer’s pale human knuckles, and the smooth, gleaming metal of his prosthetic ones. “…I just wanted to know if that was Real Fidds, or Fake Fidds,” he tells. “Y’know--” Stan picked up his other hand and gave it a lazy wobble above his lap, before dropping it back onto his blanket. “--The one who  _seduced me.”_

Fiddleford suddenly explodes with a braying, ugly bark of a laugh, and the sound goes right into those warm, fluttering places behind Stanley’s ribs. “ _Weeell?”_  The brunet drawls, expectant.

It’s another few seconds until Fiddleford’s laughter dies down into short, smiley, breathy giggles.

When he’s suitably laughed-out, he picks up his head until he’s leaning on his upper arms and elbows against the mattress, Stan’s hand still held in both of his. He brings those knobby, strong knuckles down to his lips, and presses a fond kiss to Stanley’s skin. “It was me,” he mumbles against. “It was the real me.”

“I’d hoped,” Stan admits. “Because, you were all… confident. And  _knowledgeable_. And,  _into me.”_ For a second, he sounds as awed as Fiddleford had suspected he’d been when they’d first started seeing each other. “And, really-- I liked that Fidds. That confident, caring Fidds. Like… Horny tease one minute, considerate boyfriend the next.”

“I’m glad, because that’s…” Fiddleford’s smile got softer, until it was nothing more than a faint bow of his lips as he got stuck in memory. “That’s the real me.” He looked at the green, knitted regulation hospital blanket, and felt his mouth set into a tight line. “I felt like myself the most in the beginnin’, you know.” He realized he was absently stroking over and over with his thumbs on the back of Stanley’s hand, but he didn’t really care.

“Of us. I just… I hid him away when I saw you fallin’ in love. It got me scared. That’s when I pulled the mean, bossy bastard out. ‘Cause, y’know.” A brief bounce of his shoulders. “He’s my shield.”

“ _Was_  your shield,” Stan clarified. But now Stanley’s giggling. “Buuut, I  _liked_  bein’ bossed around by you. That was… amazing. Not the rude, cold shit, but the--” Stan stops, licks his lips as he blinks, and then he resumes laughing. “--The pushy bottom stuff? I  _like that.”_

Fiddleford’s smile returned. “You’re a freak.”

Stan wiggled his head against his pillow as he closed his eyes and grinned. “I’m a  _freeeeak_.”

“I can still boss you ‘round,” Fidd told. He stood from his seat, and leaned over closer to hover over Stanley’s face. The bartender wore an expression like Christmas had come early, and Fiddleford knew it wasn’t all from the drugs. “But,  _this_  time, it’ll be because I love you, and not ‘cause I’m tryna keep you away,” he swore.

“ _That’s_  my baby,” Stanley proclaimed, voice rough with joy. His eyes were softly hooded and earnest, and so stupidly  _tender_  that, for a second, the engineer was reminded of that time in the front hall when Stan had stopped him and held him close, and had whispered how he couldn’t get Fiddleford out of his head.

“Damn right,” Fiddleford agreed, his own voice pitched lower to match the honest timbre. He swept a hand up the side of Stanley’s face and sealed his mouth over the other’s, kissing Stan in a gentle press of lips that was meant to go no further than the experience itself.

 

. .::. .

_[EIGHT MONTHS LATER]_

 

The suits file out in slow order, each flicking guarded, quizzical looks to where Stanley is leaned against the wall, soundlessly tapping one of his red tennis shoes where he’s got it crossed at the ankle over his other. He scratches day-old stubble and smiles brightly at them.

The bartender knows he must reek of old beer and cigarettes, and he nods with a faux-salute at one of the severe-looking women as she passes by. “Ma’am.”

As soon as the last investor has left the boardroom, Fiddleford’s impassive, controlled expression melts into an eyeroll and an open-mouthed sigh. He stands from his chair and makes his way over to Stan, saying: “God, just bein’ around all these snobs is makin’ me feel like I need a shower.”

“Let’s get a burger instead,” Stanley suggested, pecking him on the lips before holding the door open.

“You smell like the alley behind a nightclub,” Fiddleford remarks as he crosses the threshold. Still, he sidles up close to Stanley as they make their way down the marble hallway, ignoring the scattered stares of lesser, faceless MGL employees. “What did Dan have you doin’ today?”

Stan grasps at Fiddleford’s metal hand, and is allowed to swing it between them as they walk. “Well, the kegs had’ta be moved so’s Lorraine could clean behind them, and there was this big wooden one full of sour beer that had a crack in it, and I… kiiind’a got splashed.”

The engineer’s nose wrinkles. “Ew.”

“Tell me about it,” Stan commiserates. “Dan almost  _cried_ ; said he built that keg himself.”

“That man needs to go back to woodworkin’,” Fiddleford declares. “His heart just ain’t in bein’ a publican.”

“Trust me, babe, I think Lorraine’s already climbed up on that wagon,” Stanley assures. “I think she got the number for Dan’s cousin upstate-- The one with, uh, the logging camp? Anyway, on their anniversary or somethin’, I think she’s planning to get him up there for a week; y’know, smother him with  _evidence of his passions_ , or whatever. She’s got it phrased out all poetic.”

Fiddleford nods. “That’s a good plan. I bet he won’t be able to resist.”

They turn a corner as Fiddleford teethes at his upper lip. “Stanley… I  _am_  glad you still got a friendship with Lorraine,” he tells.

“Yeah. Me, too,” Stanley hums. “She’s a good lady.”

“That she is.”

_The day that Fiddleford fired Lorraine, Dan Corduroy had spilled his heart out into Lorraine's lap and had begged her to stay in town-- with him. And, Lorraine, never one to disobey her mother when it came to things like "gift horses" (or "sensitive lumberjacks professing their love"), had made it clear her answer was a very enthusiastic yes._

The engineer frowns to himself. “…I can’t believe I almost tried to kick her out’a Oregon. Well--” he backtracks, “I mean, I  _can_  believe it; I know myself. But. I shouldn’t’ve done that.” His voice is small when he adds: “…I still feel bad about it.”

“Everything was fucked up there for a while, Fidds,” Stanley breezed. “I was a mess,  _you_  were a mess… We were just trying to hurt each other, ‘cause we were scared.”

He reaches out his free hand to press the button for the elevator, and looks over to meet the older man’s keen gaze. “Y’ _know_  I’ve forgiven you,” Stan reminds.

“By the grace’a god, I can only imagine how,” Fiddleford muttered, following him into the lift. The elevator descends a couple of floors before he starts out: “I was a fuckin’ piece of work, Stanley. I would’a fired Jesus if it were possible, and I’d’ve thought it’d’ve kept you away from someone who weren’t me. I was a fuckin’ monster.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“Yes, I was.”

“Fiddleford,  _no_.”

“I  _was_ , Stanley--”

“Fidds, are you  _tryin’_  to get me to call you a jerk?” Stanley demands, mildly incredulous.

“…No. I guess not,” Fiddleford admits. 

“Good.” The younger man slings an arm around Fiddleford’s shoulders as they pass through the last hallway. “And I  _won’t_  call you a jerk unless you  _deserve_ _it_ , you nerd.”  
  
“Thanks, moron,” Fiddleford mutters, affectionately patting the dangling hand by his neck. “Though, I sorely deserved it before.”

“That ain’t you now,” Stanley easily counters. The matter-of-fact, non-negotiable cadence ringing in his deep voice sounds  _so sure_.

The engineer takes a second to absorb the sound, before he nods. “True.”

_Stanley had been hobbling around in Fidd's wing of the Manor for something like a week when he'd piped up about wanting to swing by the Oak for a visit. There had been brief visits from the others while he was in hospital, but never for very long. Fiddleford was already as pleased as punch to be waiting hand-and-foot on the healing bartender; Stanley could have asked to "swing by Vegas real quick", and Fiddleford would have made it happen._

_While Stan had been pleased to see his friends, his friends hadn't been... quite so pleased to see Fiddleford. (Dan had even broken his own rule about relegating all furniture-breaking rage to the back alley, and it took his girlfriend snapping a handcrafted pool cue to get his attention off of trying to punch the engineer's head inside out.)_

_Liquor had eased the rest of the afternoon. A single beer had left Stanley tipsier than Sheriff Blubs, due to the brunet's painkillers, and Stan had entertained himself with chattering nonsense with Susan and Preston at a table while Lorraine had pulled Fiddleford onto a stool at the bar. Almost immediately, Fiddleford had tried to guiltily offer her her job back, but Lorraine had flatly told him to shove it. After a few choice, deserved phrases later, the redhead had been offering a truce. It seemed that, if the silver lining to getting fired from your job was finally getting into a relationship with the man of your dreams, then Lorraine didn't really see the point in staying angry._

_"It's mostly for Stanley's sakes, though," Lorraine had pointed out. "I'm not looking to be your buddy, but I am lookin' to stay his. And, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that it'd take a direct act from some kind'a higher power to tear you two apart for real. So--" She'd tossed back the shot of whiskey standing beside Fiddleford's tumbler; they preferred the same brand, he'd learned. "--This is my olive branch, bucko. Don't squander it. Or, next time, I ain't stoppin' Dan when he goes for your face."_

Fiddleford watches their feet as they descend the stairs.

“Thank you, Stanley,” he quietly says.

Stan presses a kiss to the side of Fiddleford’s head.

“Anytime, Fiddlesticks.”

 

. . .

Once Stanley had been released from the hospital, he’d been forbidden from riding motorcycles until his bones had healed  _and_  his physical therapy had been completed. The cast had come off back in March, but Stan’s ribs were still being deemed “not so great”, so his PT was extended until the end of June.

_(The loudmouthed griping about muscle stiffness in his range of motion as he healed had been cut off sometime back in April, when Fiddleford had airily pointed out: “Well, I thought you **liked**  lyin’ back and havin’ me do all the work.” Stanley had cackled until he’d had to hold his sides, and gasp for Fidd to shake out one of his pills.)_

At least with Stanley being without transportation, Fiddleford had nothing but endless opportunities to drive his boy wherever he could possibly want to go; an arrangement that only further served Stanley’s lazy streak, and Fidd’s inborn desire to take control of everything.

They find the Bentley in Fiddleford’s reserved spot, blessedly parked in steady shade, and they slide inside the cab; Stanley immediately reaching over to crank the air once his seatbelt was clicked. When Fidd had the car rolling through the security line and heading for the road, he shifted his grip and met Stan’s open, waiting hand where it rest on the center console.

“Hey, you know next Tuesday will mark me bein’ in Gravity Falls for a whole year?” The bartender said.

“Really?” Fiddleford thought. “Huh. I was sure you’d come later than the start’a June.”

“Nah, I got here ‘round the end of May. I think.”

Fidd hums. “I didn’t see you at the bar until sometime near the middl’a the month, I guess. I was real busy with some dumb dinner thing at the Manor; some summer function Vicky throws every year.” He goes silent as his eyebrows rise innocently. “Speakin’a which…”

Stanley looked over. “Oh,  _no_ ,” he started. “No, I hate those parties. Babe. I can’t stand those assholes.”

“Neither can I,” Fiddleford agreed easily. “But they’re slap full’a cash, and so disgustin’ly whitebread that none of ‘em can hold their liquor.”

The bartender wrinkled his chin, looking out through the windshield. He rubbed his thumb across the back of Fiddleford’s hand. “Huh,” he grunted. “You, uh… You mean they’re all lightweights?”

“Most of ‘em.”

“…And they’re stupid rich? Like, stupid-with-their-money rich?”

“Oh, yeah.  _All_  of ‘em.”

Stan made a nonchalant, one-shouldered shrug. “I guess I could go.”

Fiddleford’s laughter fills the car like music.

 

. .::. .

 

The party was in full swing, and… it was actually kind of fun.

Stan had gathered a small crowd near the catering table with an off-the-cuff decision to bust out his “Mister Mystery” persona, and after coming up with something inventive and enthrallingly  _ridiculous_  done with a little sleight-of-hand, some fast talking, and managing to replace a spectator’s Rolex with a string of cocktail shrimp (and get them to laugh their ass off about it), the brunet now had a fresh wad of big-numbered cash flapping between his greedy fingers.

“Man, I love when the dumb ones got dough,” he muttered to himself, grinning. He was leaning against a bit of wall near the alcove to the main hall’s bathrooms, whistling as he counted out his victory. Damn, he was  _good_  at this.

“You know they were only admirin’ the cut of your suit as you moved,” he hears. Stanley looks out towards the crowd, and finds Fiddleford walking over. The engineer’s eyeing him playfully. “ _That’s_  why they weren’t payin’ attention to the trick,” Fiddleford elaborates, once he’s closer.

“Oh,  _were_  they?” Stanley inquires, voice climbing with fake surprise. He folds the money together and easily stuffs it into a discreet breast pocket inside his suit jacket, raising his eyebrows as he adjusts his glasses. “Those people have no manners. Objectifyin’ a poor, simple man like myself. I tell you, the world today.”

“ _Weeell_ ,” Fidd drawls, moving into Stan’s space as he leans against his lover’s front. His arms loop around the younger man’s trim waist, openly admiring the taper of Stanley’s (now tailored) suit. “Maybe it was just  _me_  doin’ the objectifyin’.”

Wide arms come up to wrap securely on Fiddleford’s back. “That’s more like it.”

It’s a nice kiss; unhurried, a casual indulgence. Stanley had noticed they’d been kissing like this a lot more ever since his accident, but he didn’t mind-- in all honesty, he’d found that he’d be happy  _just_  kissing Fiddleford, half the time. (And Fiddleford was only ever too happy to oblige.)

“I’m gon’a go rub a lil’ elbow with the dowager whatshername for a second,” Fiddleford said, when he pulled back, “but I’ll be right back.” He moved his arms down and lifted his heels to lean up and peck a kiss against Stanley’s nose.

“Hey, no funny stuff,” Stan mock-threatened, as Fiddleford started to walk off. He folded his arms as he reclined on the wall again. “You keep that elbow clothed, hussy.”

“Stanley,  _please_ ,” the engineer rolled his eyes. “It’s the armpit that actually makes money, you know.”

“Oh, gross,” the bartender hooted, pushing up his glasses. “You are  _gross_.”

Fiddleford shot him one more grin, before disappearing into the crowd. Stan had an inkling he was staring dopily in the direction Fidd had gone, but he didn’t particularly mind.

“I had hoped the rumors were false.”

Stan turned his head to his left. There was a man standing near the mouth of the other alcove-- pristinely dressed in a three-piece suit, his platinum hair cut short, and stylishly parted. He held a champagne glass in one of his long-fingered, hairless hands, and he watched Stanley with an obvious, amused distaste.

Everything about the guy made the bartender feel  _uncomfortable_.

Stanley subtly tightened the cross of his arms. “What are you on about, now?”

The man made a prim, one-shouldered shrug. “Fiddleford McGucket must be hitting a midlife crisis,” he mused aloud. “Why else would he be slumming around with the hired stooge?”

“Hey, I’m nobody’s party clown,” Stan snapped, unconsciously gripping onto the bold anger of his Mister Mystery shtick as a means to distance himself from the nervousness that coiled behind his navel. “I’m not  _hired_  to be here, pal, I was  _invited_ ,” he says, jerking out a thumb to point it back at his chest for emphasis.

“Hmm,” the man hums, looking down at his glass. “And you think you actually belong here, do you?”

“You got a problem with me?” Stanley demands, even as awkward self-consciousness slapped panic against his bravado.

“I have a problem with matzo shysters daring to move above their place in the ghetto,” the man riposted, a frown darkening his thin, hatchet-faced features as he walked closer.

Stan felt fear freeze into his middle.

“ _Andrej_.”

Fiddleford snapped the name like a gunshot. He stalked past Stan and moved into the taller blond’s space, his expression shuttered and icy.

“If you insult Stanley Pines one more time,” he warned, “I will pull out  _all_  collaborative patent rights with your people.”

The man-- Andrej --looked down at the engineer with the same frown. “This is the company you…  _intentionally_  keep now, Fiddleford?” He asked, plummy voice politely disgusted.  
  
“Didn’t you see my press release?” Fiddleford returned, his own voice pitched into an obvious dare.

“Yes, I did,” Andrej said. “I thought it was for charity.”

Fiddleford’s glower deepened. “It’s  _real_. And you need to get used to it.”

“…I thought you were with ones more like…” His eyes rolled skyward as he thought, sharp features lighting up when he remembered a name. “Lloyd Ewing, for example.”

“There are no ‘ _ones’_ ; not anymore,” Fiddleford explained. “And I was never  _with_  Lloyd Ewing. I was fuckin’ his brains out so I could steal a percentage of his resource rights, but I was never  _with_  him. I wasn’t  _with_  any of ‘em.”

“Then what did you call yourself doing?”

“They were ass, Andrej.”

Stan feels his eyebrows shoot to his hairline.

“In all permutations of the word,” Fiddleford continued. “They were rich, they were powerful, and I used what I had to take from them until  _I_  was the one with the stuff to take. But they were all just ass.”

The engineer stepped back, aligning himself beside Stanley, and he directed a pointer finger over to the bartender. “ _This one_ , however,” Fiddleford proclaims, “He is  ** _not_**. And from here on out, you are gon’a  _respect_   _him_  as though he is an extension of myself  _or so help me_ ,” his accent is powerful with righteous threat, “I will sever ties with Glissen International, and then  _I will come for you and yours_  like I’ve been sent down from the proverbial mountain to ruin your lives, and you won’t even have enough to fill a matchbox when I get through.”

Fiddleford hadn’t looked over at Stanley not once during his speech. If he had, he would have seen the awed, shamelessly smitten expression tilting around Stan’s eyes.

“Choose your next words wisely, Andrej,” Fiddleford cautions.

Andrej Glissen was many things, but he wasn’t stupid. Whatever the hell Fiddleford McGucket called himself doing with this…  _person_ , it wasn’t worth acknowledging. Especially if losing a powerhouse ally like MGL was to be the price for the acknowledgment.

Andrej gives a smooth, flawless smile. “So nice meeting you, Mr Pines,” he croons pleasantly, before exiting the alcove.

The exhale that leaves Stanley is shaky with excitement.

“… _Hoooolyshit_ , Fidds,” he breathes. “Just-- I can’t even say anything. That was beautiful.”

Fiddleford is still staring out across the tile. He pushes up a couple of fingers to adjust his glasses. “Are you as turned on as I am right now?”

“You could break rocks with what I’ve got happening in my shorts,” Stan immediately informs.

“Then let’s go crack the marble sink in my bathroom.”

The grin on his face is perfect delight. “You got it, baby.”

Fiddleford’s right hand slips out and laces warm, metal fingers tightly with Stanley’s left as they cut through the edge of the crowd to start up the stairs.

“Hey, did you really steal from all those rich guys?” Stan asks, when they’re on the third landing.

“Well, in all honesty,” Fiddleford began, “I actually sat them down and then we spent some time negotiatin’ some--  _Haha, ahahaha_ ,” he cuts himself off with a tickled peal of laughter. “You know damn well I stole from those fools, Stanley.”

The hoot that leaves the brunet is almost manic with glee. “Oh my  _god_ , I  _love_ _you.”_

“And I am so glad I love you, too,” the engineer declares.

Stanley swings Fiddleford’s arm high enough so that he can stoop mid-step to lean over and press a fast kiss to the back of the engineer’s hand, and the thrilled, excited smile that illuminates the smaller man’s expression seems brighter than the sun itself. 

 

. '' .

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YOU'RE ALL WELCOME.
> 
> <3


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